


A Jinx By Any Other Name

by misreall



Series: Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it. [4]
Category: Loki: Agent of Asgard, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angel Wings, Angels, Angry Sex, Being a big idiot, Being an even bigger idiot, Commitment, Demon Sex, Demons, F/M, Fear, Getting back to the smut, Horn Stimulation, Horn kink, Kissing, Light Bondage, Loki is a disaster, Love, Memory Magic, Mildly Dubious Consent, Oral Sex, Phone Sex, Pregnancy Kink, Rough Kissing, Rough Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Sex, Shopping, Spells & Enchantments, Tender Sex, True Love, Truth Spells, Vaginal Sex, Voice Kink, Witches, Wizards, nonconsentual spell casting, pretty much anything might happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-10-06 01:28:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20498636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misreall/pseuds/misreall
Summary: Almost a year has passed since Nora first brought home the statue containing Loki the Incubus.  A lot has changed, including Loki's status which has gone from demon to fallen angel.  When Nora and her cousin Maura attend the yearly meeting of their coven she discovers that the course of true love really did ne'er run smooth and this time it isn't even Loki's fault.





	1. she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need. - PG Wodehouse

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to Caffiend for letting me play with her toys, Thomas and Maura!

For one precious moment, Thomas thought he was having a bad dream.

Then he internally frowned at himself for having such a trite thought, knowing that he was not having a bad dream. That was just wishful thinking.

“Why are you happening to me?” he asked Loki who had neatly landed in Thomas’s garden, folded his black swan’s wings away, and taken the empty seat at the little wrought iron table where he had been having a light breakfast. 

“Good morning to you as well, wizard, and yes, I would love to have a scone,” the fallen angel answered, picking up the silver pot from the warmer in the center of the table. “Coffee, I hope?”

“Tea,” Thomas answered, burying the word in enough ice to save the polar bears. “Golden tippy.”

Loki grimaced, “Tea....” he said, mocking Thomas’s accent and intonations, “is nothing but a series of weeds with ideas above their station.” Then, emptying the dregs from his extra-large, lipstick red travel mug, he transmogrified the brew and poured himself an enormous amount of Italian roast.

Thomas scowled and Loki tutted, still sounding like a public school dropout. “Never fear, brother-in-law mine, I would never deny someone their morning drink of choice.” Then he lapsed back into his own teasing, Enochian drawl, “Even if it’s just gross,” he added as he refilled Thomas’s Wedgewood teacup from the same pot.

A very fine, fragrant Assam of very slightly better quality than what he had been drinking already perfumed the air. 

Thomas hated Loki.

He hated his sense of humour, his sporadic vulgarity, his smug smile, even his fashion sense most of the time. 

For instance, that otherwise beautiful fall morning as his roses slept, having given way to the autumnal glory of pansies and asters, was being marred by the incubi’s choice of black leather pants, an American sports jersey in green and white that was tight enough that his emerald nipple piercing could be seen through it, and brilliantly polished gold caps on his horns. 

He looked like a refugee from Coachella. Though by Loki standards it was positively demure. No jade studded codpiece like the one he’d worn to Thomas and Maura’s wedding rehearsal dinner. Though then Nora had been there to rein in her … concubine and make him change before they met the rest of the bride’s family and more significantly the coven that both of their witches belonged to.

“Firstly,” Thomas said after taking a fortifying sip, “we are not ‘brothers-in-law’. Maura and Nora are cousins, not sisters-”

Before he could continue Loki waved away the technicalities of familial connections, which he did not understand and plainly found dreary and far too mortal to bother with.

“NOR,” Thomas continued, raising his voice to be heard over Loki’s tedious ennui, “are you and Nora married. Thankfully. That poor woman has enough troubles without being bound to you ceremonially.”

“Actually, old man,” Loki said in tones again meant to mock Thomas, after eating an entire currant scone slathered in most of the pot of clotted cream and all of a jar of tart cherry jam in one rather horrifying bite, “that would be what I am here about. I’ve decided, with our first anniversary of sorts rapidly approaching, to ask Nora to marry me.” 

He put a forearm on the table and leaned over it, looking from side to side in a conspiratorial style with one raven-black brow raised, and whispered, “I’m more than convinced she’ll say yes, sport.”

Thomas shook off the ick of Loki’s pet names and asked, “Is that even remotely legal? Anywhere?” He poured himself another cup of tea. 

It was coffee. 

He poured the cup onto the grass, giving Loki a quelling look.

Loki shrugged, “Shall I bitch the pot, then?” he asked, waving the side of a hand over Thomas’s cup to eliminate the dregs of the offensive brew and then refilled it, this time with a quite passable Darjeeling. “To your question, it is neither more nor less legal than your marrying Maura,” he gave a significant pause and then added, “How…”

Thomas raised a finger to silence the demi or perhaps hemi-demon. At some point Loki had deduced who the ‘last wizard in England’ was, or at least who he had been some number of centuries before. There were many old enemies who would happily take their overdue revenge on Thomas’s innocent wife or soon to be born child, so Loki had promised to keep his secret.

He had even reluctantly kept it from Nora, as Thomas had yet to figure out a way to tell Maura. She knew he was not exactly as he seemed, accepting it was a happy side effect of his role as a wizard, but most likely she would not be quite so calm knowing her husband was closer to five hundred than he was to fifty. It might be too much of a shock in her delicate condition.

Also, because Maura was the farthest thing from delicate in any condition, it might also lead his having to sleep elsewhere for the near future, even though they lived in a house  **he ** had owned since the 18th century.

While all of this exposition flitted its way through Thomas’s brain Loki drank coffee and waited, as if he  _ knew _ somehow that those thoughts were flitting. When they were done he went on.

“Anyway. I have decided that while the ladies are away on their witchy business I’d occupy myself with finding the perfect ring for my treasure’s lovely hand. And as I knew you were most likely bored too, I thought you could go with me. Add a second set of eyes, as…” he trailed off, looking to the delightfully blue sky, a crisp wind flirting with his long black hair, “well…” 

Thomas had a feeling he knew where this was going. He settled back with his teacup, brows raised, and let Loki fight to get the words out.

Finally, the incubus shrugged, “At times my taste might be a bit bold for Nora’s sensibilities. She grew up in  _ such _ a plebian time, my poor pet. And since you are as boring as you are old and handsome - sadly - I was hoping you might temper some of my enthusiasm.”

He smiled in an unusually guileless way that Thomas found difficult to look at directly. 

Rather, he started to list the ways in which Loki was wrong, “To begin with, unlike you I have an occupation that takes up my time, in addition to other things I have to do, such as finish redecorating the nursery. The doors haven’t even been opened since the Regency and based on the spiderwebs visible from the windows I think I might have an infestation of ghost goliath bird-eaters that are feeding on residual magical energy. That said, even were I not very busy, _ very  _ busy, when Maura is out of town she need not fear a call from the constabulary because I lack both inner resources and impulse control and cannot be trusted out of her sight.”

Loki waved a hand and then leaned his chin on the palm of his hand, lightly drumming his longish, black fingernails on his cheek. “One time. And the members of the CPD were more than understanding.”

“And besotted.”

“Well, yes.” 

“If I am right it is only one time because Nora has only left you without a keeper one time.”

“Fine.” Loki’s brilliant green eyes grew narrow with thought. “Ghost spiders you say? Nasty things. And you can never be certain that you got all of them. One mistake a year from now you might find your infant wrapped in silk and ready to be made an arachnid smoothie. I don’t think that would make Maura happy.”

“Or me,” Thomas murmured.

“You probably don’t know this, but one of my powers as an angel is to banish certain types of supernatural beings. Spider spirits would be on that list.”

Thomas frowned, “You aren’t exactly an angel…”

“Close enough for government work. I recently dispelled a nest of were-snakes from a restaurant in Wisconsin and now Nora and I have free surf and turf everytime we want to drive across the ‘cheddar curtain,’” he said, making scare quotes which made Thomas want to hit him.

“Were-snakes?”

“They turn into giant centipedes on the full moon. Really giant centipedes. So what do you say? You help me find the perfect ring, regardless of the legality - whatever that means - of my marrying my precious witch, and I shall ensure that your house remains free of massive, undead spiders, enchanted tigers be they living, dead, or sentient, and, oh, I’ll throw in vampires. They’re so annoying, I love fucking with them. What do you say, bro?”

Thomas considered. Yes, he could probably handle the spider situation by himself, but Loki was for all of his tiresome antics and generally being a pain in the ass an extremely powerful supernatural being, and while Thomas was a great wizard his methods took more time. 

Also, he was fond enough of Nora that he wasn’t willing to let Loki run around, getting into trouble and picking out ostentatious jewelry for her when he could offer some help.

“Where do you plan on finding this perfect ring.”

Loki drained his massive mug and poured himself another, “I have a few ideas.”

  
  


The annual meeting (or Convocation for the more portentous) of the coven that Maura and Nora belonged to, and that Aunt Claire had been one of the inner circle of, was always convened to in the time between the autumn equinox and the Halloween Blood moon, allowing for plenty of travel time for even the most far-flung sisters both coming and going, as everyone needed to be home for both events.

The previous year Nora had only been home from the Convocation two days when she’d gotten the call for a bit of what seemed like witchy work that had brought Loki into her life. Which had brought Thomas into Maura’s life.

It seemed like a hundred years rather than one, when they talked about everything had happened since then while sharing an Uber from the airport to the secret hotel in the Atlas mountains. Only their coven, a group of eccentric gourmands who gathered every New Year’s Eve to make a gigantic group dinner, two rather notorious rock stars, and a famous author everyone believed to be dead used it, though every now and then a hiker or two would get lost and the Le Bel Hôtel sans Chambres Aman was always pleased to offer a room for a brief stay at a shockingly reasonable price.

Nora hated it. Between the price of the flight into Marrakech, the time away from finding work at home, the fee for even the cheapest room available - they weren’t offered the feckless hikers discount - and the sheer boredom of the lectures, breakaway meetings, and cocktail small talk she was always ready to pull her hair out by the end of the week.

Only the highest ranking witches, their Sabbat of the chief twelve plus their Supreme, ever really accomplished anything. Nora was pretty sure that they only insisted on the yearly event just to prove they were so powerful that none of the rest of them would dare not show up. 

Maura agreed, but was politic enough not to say it out loud.

This year, however, would at least be a little interesting since for the first time in ten years they would be replacing a member of the Sabbat. 

Taking Claire’s place.

Claire was currently in the form of a rather ratty street cat wearing a purple velvet collar and sleeping on Nora’s lap as they sat in the auditorium, apparently not especially interested in who was going to take her place. Then again, she hadn’t regained the ability to speak since that brief time she’d had it last winter, so who really knew what she wanted?

Maura, her twins to be having just started kicking, tried to get comfortable in the rather old, folding seat and kicked her shoes off under the chair in front of her, her swollen feet looking red and sore. Nora patted her shoulder. They both just wanted to get home.

Around them witches from the far corners of the world, some so old they looked like if they tripped they would turn to dust, a few barely old enough to walk, mostly female, some male, some both, others neither, filled the chairs. Everyone was dressed in their version of business casual for the opening event. Of course for witches that meant something different.

Nora wore jeans and a sweater.

Maura had on a black cotton dress with a blue scarf.

Next to them a gorgeous older woman from Tehran was in a very expensive suit.

Beside her was a naked octogenarian.

There were a few Stevie Nicks clones, some hippies, a few Goths, and a lot of yoga pants since an uncomfortable witch was likely to make mistakes.

No one had worn their hats. Those were saved for the closing ceremony.

Finally, the lights went up on the stage where thirteen chairs - each of them different and particular to the witch who would take it - were in a semicircle. Mussorgsky’s  _ Hut on Fowl’s Legs _ began to play softly as they were filled.

All but one.

Nora stroked Claire’s back. The little cat stretched out her back legs but didn’t wake.

As the Supreme Baba Yaga took her center seat last, striking the stage three times with her staff.

Normally she said little and looked more bored than anyone during the opening gathering, sometimes circling her hand to get one of the other witches to speed it up if they were talking too much, or even snoring loudly if she was really annoyed. This time she raised a hand to stop Evelyn Hechizo, who really loved the sound of her own voice, from standing and walking to the podium.

“No, no. Let’s not beat around the bush, babies and bitches. We have one important piece of business here. The only important one. You can all go to your little lectures on the role of the witch on the interwebs, or how to translate hedgewitchery into the city or whatever the fuck you go on about, but we all know that what we are really here to do is fill a seat.”

The tiny, ancient woman stood, her babushka sliding a bit forward as she dramatically pointed to the seat in question.

“I know some of you have been lobbying for Claire’s place since the moment she flatlined,” Maura reached over and squeezed Nora’s hand. “Some of you since before it. Politics. Bribes. Favors.” Her voice grew louder as she paced, “Doesn’t matter a fuck! This is not a democracy. The first word,” she raised a finger, “and the last, are mine.”

The hubbub of the audience grew until they threatened to drown out Baba Yaga, and the other, powerful witches on the stage were clearly angry and disturbed. Except Helen Mirren. She never got worked up over anything. 

The old woman had always been a bit of a tyrant, but she’d always at least listened to the thoughts of others. 

“Закрой рот!” she roared.

It was questionable if everyone fell silent because of the power of her voice or if she had cast a spell. With Baba Yaga you never knew.

“Everyone open your introductory packet,” she said more calmly. “Most of you will have the usual - schedule of events, flyers, free breakfast tokens, the usual. Seven of you will have none of that bullshit, just the number of a room and a time. Those seven are MY chosen candidates. That’s all, Evelyn, talk, I know you’re dying to,” she said, motioning for the Mexican bruja to give the speech she had clearly forgotten she was still holding as she walked to the microphone, her mouth hanging open.

It didn’t matter, all anyone could hear was the sound of tearing paper, groans of disappointment, and a few shrieks of joy as allegedly lucky witches found themselves possessed of the uncanny equivalent of a golden ticket.

Nora counted.

One shriek, then two, then two more almost at the same time, a little chirping noise that was a more modest version of a shriek, then a very showy gasp. 

Then nothing.

Everyone looked around, stirring and murmuring as bits of paper flew through the air and the ozone scent of anticipation rose.

Nora looked at Maura.

Maura opened her envelope and sighed with relief, “Thank god. I’ve been eating for three lately and that free breakfast buffet will never know what hit it.”

Nora looked at her envelope.

Claire woke up, blinked, and then swiped at the top of it like a letter opener.

Inside was one sheet of paper - Room 375, 4:15 AM.

Nora dropped her head into her hands and moaned. 

There was only one requirement for being one of the Sabbat. 

No permanent attachments. 

Maura said it for her.

“Well, shit.”


	2. What are you gonna do, angel face? Stab me with your eyebrow pencil?  - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki goes ring shopping, Nora deals with a job offer.

Loki had made a list of a number of the most interesting rings throughout human history. 

There was the diamond given by Archduke Maximillian to Mary of Burgundy in 1477, which was probably the first engagement ring ever given, which was pretty, but Nora would probably be bored by white diamonds, even cunningly marquis cut ones. He knew he was. Beside which, Mary had died a year after the wedding, so there was bad luck to be considered as well.

Thomas sighed as Loki replaced it in the ring box on the little velvet stand where the museum had it displayed. 

“You didn’t think I would just go for the first one without shopping around a bit, did you?” he asked the wizard.

“I had hoped. Now get us out of here, the spell on the cameras in starting to fray. Magic and technology mix in unfortunate ways.”

“Stop fussing,” Loki said, sauntering past him to hand the keys back to the security guard that had happily let them in, kissing the man on his beardy cheek. “Thank you, Martin,” he whispered in close in the guard’s ear.

Martin shivered, his eyes blank and his cock hard as any of the pikestaffs in the rest of the display in the fifteenth century exhibit, “Thank you, sir.”

Thomas made a sound that implied a large quantity of vomit was in the offing, which meant it was time to go.

More interesting was the ring given by the Pharaoh to Joseph as a sign of his favor and power and how much Pharoah really,  _ really _ liked him. It was pure gold with some rather lovely hieroglyphs on each side of the charming cube it had in place of a stone. Sadly, the configuration made it damned uncomfortable, Loki mused as he stretched out his hand to admire how it looked there.

The style, at once elegant and crude - that cube could easily break a nose with even a casually thrown backhand - spoke to him.

Maybe he could just keep it for himself? After all, his own pain threshold was rather high….

Thomas cleared his throat and pointed at the famous, elderly New York antiquities collector that he was currently sitting on, a spell of sleep wrapped around his head and that of his pretty, and too young wife. “If I keep them under too long it can cause irreversible brain damage. We are quickly reaching that time.”

Loki sighed, taking it the ring back off. This wasn’t about him.

The ring of Trajan’s queen Plotina was ugly

Pricilla Presley’s ring from Elvis was delightfully vulgar but really not  _ the _ thing.

The iron ring of Prometheus was impressive but would most likely give a mixed message as far as the giver’s view of marriage was. Also, as Nora was not a Greek titan she probably would rip her entire hand off even trying to lift the damned thing.

After gently slipping an ornately carved jade ring back onto the delicate, mummified finger of a long forgotten Mongolian princess who had been a Chinese imperial consort - and tenderly brushing his lips over the back of her hand in memory of a night they had shared by a lake - Loki began to wonder if he might not be better off designing his own. 

Of course, considering how Thomas was seething at the moment, telling his future cousin-in-law that was the new plan might be awkward.

Fortunately, he was saved by the bell.

Or, rather, the ringtone of Thomas’s phone.

Thomas wondered why Maura was up so late, being it was well after midnight in Morocco. “Is everything alright? Are you? Are the babies?”

“Hello to you as well, Tommy,” she said, again taking advantage of his declared moratorium on spankings as well as any other earned - or just for play - punishments until after the twins were born. “We are all very well, thank you.”

“I thought your phones were magicked off for the course of the week?”

“I left the grounds and walked high enough up the mountainside that the tungsten in the rocks would short out the spell for a while. It’s beautiful, but my feet are aching somethin’ fierce.”

In his head he could see his very pregnant wife standing on a pile of rocks, high in the mountains, trying to get a phone signal and his head felt like it was going to burst. The list of punishments he was tallying in his brain was growing ever more impressive. His darling girl would be lucky if she would ever sit without wincing again.

Then he imagined her sitting, holding the babies as she fed them, her lovely breasts just gushing with milk and he was hard enough to drill through the granite that the Gobi’s mountains were made of. 

While he had found Maura’s pregnancy, her carrying of his first children in centuries, highly erotic this was an extreme reaction even for him.

He looked over to where Loki was looking at something on his own phone, certain that spending excessive time in the incubi’s presence was having a perverse effect on him. 

Thomas was about to question him when a deep frown line appeared between the wing of the angels’ black brows, a snarl pulled back his upper lip, and his horns heated to the point where their golden caps melted, leaving gilt streaks down their alabaster lengths.

“I’m guessing something is wrong with Nora, then?” Thomas said into the phone, keeping a weather eye on Loki the whole time.

“Oh, this might be very bad,” his wife answered, no longer sounding saucy. 

“How bad?”

Before Maura could answer Loki squeezed his phone into glass splinters and slag, his eyes burned red as the Sunrise ruby - another ring that had not been chosen on their ridiculous quest - and smoke seeped from the tips of his now erect wings. 

“Never mind, I am pretty certain know how bad.  _ Why _ is it this bad?” He spoke quickly, still keeping his eyes on Loki and reaching into his rucksack to find the sigil he had prepared in case something went wrong on their shopping trip and he was forced to temporarily restrain the incubus, who was now pacing in circles, causing the dry plants crushed beneath his boots to catch fire. 

Thomas fished the bit of suede worked with gilt ink out of his bag while Maura explained to him what was wrong. 

Damn.

He let the sigil drop and blow away into the cold desert morning.

“One moment, darling,” he said. “Loki?” he called out.

Loki turned, his hands in fists at his sides, his brows hooded like a cobra ready to strike. 

“What?” His voice was loud and rough and dark as the pit.

“Go get her. I’ll find my own way there.  _ Just  _ don’t burn the hotel down before you get Maura out as well.”

With a curt nod and a hard push of his wings against the air the fallen angel was aloft. 

“Darling? I don’t know that saying everything will be alright is even remotely accurate, but I can say with some confidence the matter will be seen to,” he told his wife, also mentioning that he needed her to send him an Uber, since he had forgotten to reload the app on his new phone.

Nora sat on one of the chairs in the hallway outside of room 375. Claire was on the chair next to hers, laying on her side and idly flicking the tip of her tail up and down as she boredly surveyed the hallway.

Because  _ Le Bel Hôtel sans Chambres Aman _ was a luxury establishment the chairs were large and comfortable, covered in striped satin fabric rather than the cheap, pleather covered curved metal seats that usually lined the halls outside of conference rooms. 

That she was comfortable did not make Nora feel any better.

She was exhausted. The last three days - starting with Loki’s vigorous goodbye before she headed to the airport and ending with the chaos caused by Baba Yaga’s announcement - she’d slept maybe six hours or so, little of it consecutive. She was so tired it was making her nauseous and loopy. 

“Did you know this was going to happen?” she asked Cat Claire, who did not even bother to look at her.

She looked at her phone. It was 5 am. Witches were not great at punctuality but forty-five minutes was a bit much even for their coven. Fifteen more minutes and she was going back to her room.

It wasn’t as if she wanted a place in the Sabbat. Power had never been Nora’s thing. For one, it demanded a great deal of time and work, and for another there always enemies and antagonists galore for anyone with too much of it. Having grown up watching Claire battle witch after enchanter after evil priestess after magic sucking eldritch horror and hardly ever have enough money for a new winter coat or enough time to go to a movie or a concert was enough to put Nora off of power forever.

That being true, she also knew that insulting the Sabbat and especially their Supreme was not a healthy idea, so even as 5:15 passed she waited.

Eventually Claire stretched, stood, turned in a circle back to the same position she had started in and went to sleep.

“Bitch,” Nora said.

One of the cat’s tattered ears flicked.

Finally, at 5:45 the door opened and Matsuko Hirai exited, laughing and shaking hands with two of the Sabbat members - Lilly Turner and Madiha Arsov, neither of whom had been especially friendly with Claire.

Nora took that as a good sign. If they liked the Japanese majo that much, and had liked Claire so little, it made her a less desirable candidate. She exchanged waves with Matsuko, straightened the skirt of the traditional black dress she had changed into, and walked past the no longer so cheerful Sabbattresses, or whatever they were called, into the room.

Unseen by any of the three of them, Claire slipped in just as the door closed.

Inside the Sabbat members sat in a semi-circle, each in a different style of chair with a small table holding a drink at her right elbow, like a feminist reeterpretation of the Olympian gods. Before them was a very uncomfortable looking folding chair with no drink offered.

“Thank you for waiting Ms. Walsh,” the youngest Sabbat, a Canadian witch named Josie McClellan said, pointing to the uncomfortable chair. “Please have a seat.”

Before she could, Baba Yaga who was sitting with her head propped on her fist, looking like she nodding off pinned Nora in place with a black and very bloodshot eye. 

It hurt. That she expected. Being brainbored by an ancient witch who was probably indifferent to the suffering of others when she was a little girl and no doubt only grown worse with time would hurt after all. But it hurt in strange places. The fingers of her right hand burned like they were being held in fire. Her liver ached like she had been stabbed there. Because she couldn’t move she couldn’t touch her neck to reassure herself her throat hadn’t been cut.

Then it stopped. 

She sat down hard on that uncomfortable chair, gasping.

“Now Ms. Walsh-” Evelyn Hechizo was again cut off by the Supreme. The dignified witch was so annoyed she actually crossed her arms and pouted, muttering, “¿Por qué nos molestamos en tener un horario?”

“Don’t bother with questions. I’m too tired.” 

Thank whoever, Nora thought to herself.

But Baba Yaga continued, “The last one, Yoko or whatever her name was, the English girl with the nice big ass, and this one. Those are the finalists. We start testing them at 11:47 tonight. No one wake me up before five, Baba needs her beauty sleep.”

Nora shot to her feet, “I’m ineligible!” she insisted as the other women started gathering their things to adjourn.

Baba Yaga finished filling the old, flower patterned handbag she carried with her hard candy, box of Kleenex, nasal spray, tatting, and People magazine, asking, “Are you under twenty-five? No. Are you knocked up like that cousin of yours? Saying no to that, too. Do you have a dick under that, maybe? Not that a cock is a deal breaker. It just means the tests are different."

The Wicked Witch of the Taiga stopped and looked at her skirt, then shook her head, “No. So you’re eligible.”

The Sabbat went back to gathering their effects and chatting about the seminars they would be leading the next day.

“I’m in a committed relationship!” Nora practically shouted.

All of the other witches stopped and looked at her.

And burst out laughing.

Claire rubbed against Nora’s ankles in solidarity.

Nora was trying not to panic as she followed Baba Yaga down to the lobby. The Supreme did not stay in the hotel proper, but lived out of her Truck - a cement mixer with a much gentler disposition than her notorious mistress. 

Though she was terrified of the Russian witch Nora felt like she had to try and make her point, so setting her shoulders, she started again as they rode in the elevator, knowing it was a bad idea. 

As were the heels she had chosen to wear since they both made her feet hurt and she was practically looming over the miniscule ancient which made her attempt to sound humble a little ludicrous. 

“Even if I wasn’t involved with someone, which I am, seriously, really, I’d be a terrible choice for the Sabbat. My magic is pretty good, but not remarkable, and I’m not interested in power and position or any of… Shit, is this one of those goddamned, ‘I’m the right person for the job because I don’t want it’ scenarios? Fuck.”

Baba Yaga gave her a begrudgingly admiring look, “Potty mouth. Good. I like it. Being afraid of words makes you weak. No, that’s stupid movie shit made up by stupid movie men. Or maybe novelists. Stupid man stuff no matter what. You are right for it because I say you are.”

The doors opened to the lobby.

“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m with someone,” she half hissed at Baba Yaga, rapidly losing her fear in her growing annoyance. 

Baba Yaga stopped walking and looked up at her with twinkling eyes, “A clever woman, who didn’t want a seat at the table would just fail, I think, the tests, yes? What did that man say, the one who wasn’t so stupid, about protesting too much?”

Nora opened her mouth. 

Later she couldn’t remember what she meant to say.

Across the beautiful, subtly elegant lobby done in dark wood and subtle warm tones of brown and deep red, the massive glass doors showed the sunrise through the mountains, filling the room with golden light.

Then there was darkness and the door burst powdering their glass and twisting their metal as massive wings blocked out the sun.

Baba Yaga raised a hand, sending the glass harmlessly away from Nora and herself. Fortunately the employees manning the check in and concierge desks the hotel were experienced with the happenings when they had one of their ‘special’ conferences there and so ducked for cover in time.

“Who the fuck are you?” Baba Yaga bellowed, turning to face him fully, her hands loose and spread at her side, her power as a Sabbat meaning she needed no spells to do any number of dangerous things.

“An interested party,” Loki hissed, which was rather impressive considering there was only one S in what he’d said, Nora noted idly as she stared at him and tried to make her mouth close itself.

Loki never been so demonic in the time she’d known him, not even during the splitsies fiasco of the last holiday season. From the tips of his horns, which were weirdly covered in gold and burning hot, to his eyes that were slit pupiled and glowing in the low light of early morning, to the long, frankly terrifying black claws on his tense fingers and bare toes, there was nothing of an angel about him. He was dressed only in the black leather laced pants he had worn the first time they met, and she gulped a bit. 

His already unfairly large cock was outlined to an obscene degree and seemed... different. There were ridges and -

Nora shook her head and stopped that line of thought. This was not a good time to get distracted, no matter how distracting his practically on display junk might be.

Even his wings and hair seemed transformed, both trailing fire as he entered the lobby.

Everything in the tight line of his lean body, where each muscle was tense and defined, was purely feral as he stalked into the lobby like it was Hell’s own catwalk. As much as she hated it, there was a part of Nora, a part that she was not on good terms with, that was rather thrilled at the whole peacocking display of him coming in to find her.

Nora wondered how Maura had gotten word out. 

Then, abruptly, Loki stopped and narrowed his eyes at the two of them and then grinned coolly, leaning on the counter, causing the hotel staff members who had started to peek up to immediately duck back down again. He chuckled and the fire dimmed around him, as a slim cut Italian suit with gleaming oxfords and a narrow tie. 

Something about that sudden course correction on his part made her nervous.

Not sure what else to do, Nora made introductions.

“Um, Supreme, this is Loki, my… er… um…” Significant other would cut no ice with the old witch, boyfriend sounded fucking dumb, and she just wasn’t going to be able to say ‘lover’ without pronouncing it ‘lovahhh’ so she just said, “this is Loki who I’m with. Loki, this is Baba Ya-”

“Greetings, Primeval Hag,” Loki said, saluting languidly with a finger flick near his brow, a glint of fang appearing as he smirked.

“Hello to you too, Primordial Sex Toy,” Baba Yaga answered.

“Oh, you know each other… that’s nice…”

“So, you two, huh?” Baba Yaga said, approaching Loki, looking him up and down. “I see the changes, _ malen'kiy d'yavo _ l. She said she was involved with someone...” The old witch sounded amused. 

“Yes,” Nora said, “we have been tog-”

They both ignored her. 

“So, you finally got the gold ring?” Baba Yaga leered and elbowed Loki in the arm, “Surprised that she can walk. You must be losing your touch.”

“Hey!” Nora said.

Loki laughed, “I’ve had to be rather careful. But yes,” He made a slight gesture and sounded rather flippant.

“What?”

“Ah, that explains why she was refusing. Cock-struck.” Baba Yaga had a knowing tone, “Hardly the first.”

“Wait a damned minute…”

Loki straightened his tie and then the rest of him, so he towered over Baba Yaga, “Not just cock, of course. But yes, she’s mine,” his voice was both proprietary and amused, “so if you’ll just exc-”

“What. The actual. Fuck.” Now Nora was the one feeling rather feral, stepping past Baba Yaga who gave her a ‘Apparently being the Supreme makes me chopped liver, then?’ look that she barely registered as she shoved Loki’s shoulder. It didn’t actually move him but she didn’t care. “What do you mean ‘she’s mine’ in that tone?”

He looked down at her, his again green eyes confused and a bit annoyed as he responded in a haughty, condescending tone, “I meant to show old BY here that since you belong to me she can’t very we-”

“Belong to you? I belong to you? Really?” Now Nora was the one making fists at her side. “So you consider me your property? That’s what you came here about?”

There were any number of things Loki could have said at that moment that might have propitiated Nora, though as tired and stressed out as she was there weren’t many. 

He could have said, “I love you, that’s why I’m here.”

Or, “I was frightened.”

Or, even, “Of course, we belong to each other.”

However, what he said was, “Well, yes…” sounding confused that she needed to be told something so obvious.

Which was why Nora turned on her heel and told Baba Yaga, “You know what, you’re right. I did protest too much. I cannot  _ wait  _ for that first test. Joining the Sabbat sounds fucking amazing.”

She had barely finished when a long, iron-strong arm wrapped around her waist and she was pulled backwards out of the lobby and up into the skies above the mountains.

The crag was filled with the scent of wild herbs, palm, and cold stone. 

Loki practically dropped Nora who, because the heels she wore, stepped back twice and then fell. He landed before her as she backed away, stripping off the shoes and throwing them at him before getting up to run.

He let her get a few feet before he trapped her, face against the rockwall, her wrists pinned above her head with one hand, snagging his claws in her short hair, pulling her head back. He bit into the nape of her neck, his fangs just about to break the skin as he kicked her legs apart and pulled his cock out.

“I’m going to fuck you, witch. Fuck you until you stop being so strange.”

“Strange? I’m being strange? You’re being-”

There was no question that Nora was already wet, so he slid it between her legs and rubbed back and forth against her panties, getting himself messy with her as she made a strangled sound of need. 

“Say ‘please’,” he whispered in her ear, dripping pheromones and magic. She’d given him a scare and he had no interest in taking it easy on her.

“How about ‘Go back to hell,’ instead?” she panted, even as she squirmed and writhed against the pressure of his cock between her legs.

It was heady, her fight and her lust and their connection. He would make her give. 

“Sadly, I think Lucy has let out my room,” he said, shifting his cock to its fully demonic form. He’d never used it with Nora before, though he’d considered it once he knew she was strong enough to take it and some of its unusual properties.

He ripped off her underwear and now let the special ridges and curve and the ever so slightly addictive quality of his precum drive her crazy so when he finally thrust hard and fully into her glorious, swollen, and now extra sensitive cunt she almost came from the impact.

Not that he would allow it.

He was much too angry.

He loved her much too much.

He fucked her relentlessly, shoving one of her hands between her own legs so she could play with herself while he used her. 

While he ratched everything higher and higher.

The thin air of the mountains had her gasping after seconds of hard fucking, so he forced her face towards him and tongue fucked her mouth and then purred in her ear, “So pretty when you are desperate. Say you belong to me and I’ll let you come.”

Because she was Nora, and had faced Lucifer, sort of, turned a demon back into an angel, almost, and was as bloody minded as any creature since the dawn of man, she laughed, “How about you finish so I can go get some sleep? I want to be fresh for my test tonight.”

Growling at her always tasty insolence, Loki reached around, touching her belly so he could feel his cock moving inside of her, “Let’s hope it won’t involve conversing, since I plan to leave you a babbling idiot,” he gritted out, pressing hard so the rarified ridges of his demon dick hit her g-, o-, a-, and u-spots all at once, plunging deeper in at the same time so they came together.

Their joint scream was echoed by a Barbary leopard and its mate, who promptly engaged themselves and later had an unusually large litter of seven very healthy cubs, which was very good as they were all but extinct as a species.

His brain cleared by the testosterone draining of a huge orgasm Loki began to think about the last hour or so and realised he had probably made a few rather serious errors. Fortunately Nora had to understand that he was more thousands of years old than the earth they stood on so being in a relationship with her, being in love at all, was the ultimate case of an old dog learning new tricks.

She would get it.

Both of them shaking, Loki tried to kiss Nora’s shoulder but she pulled away and off of him with a sound of discomfort that made him feel like the smallest creature alive.

Turning in the little space he had allowed her between him and the rock, Nora stared at him, her stubborn chin pointed at him, her jaw jutting. Her eyes trying to grow cold though her pupils were still vast and black enough that he rather wished he could disappear into them, ashamed as he was.

“Would you move, please?” she asked in a clipped tone.

He stepped to the side, “Nora-”

“No. No. I really suggest you go to Chicago and wait for me,” she said and then, with a use of power that should have been beyond her, she was gone as if she had never been there to begin with.

Baba Yaga’s dry laugh came from behind him, “I knew she was Sabbat material. Teleported straight back to her hotel room. Very nice stuff for a baby witch. Of course, you bring out the best in her, I’m sure.”

“I love her. I won’t let her go without a fight.”

He felt the hag pat him hard on the back. “I hope you lose.”

“I know.”

  
  
  
  



	3. The mistakes I've made are dead to me.  - Jonathan Safran Foer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nora and Maura eat lunch, Loki eats crow.

Nora hadn’t expected or planned on teleporting. It just sort of happened.

She had planned on walking down the mountainside, which looking back on it was a horrible plan since she was wearing a skirt and heels and had no real idea where she was other than probably still in Morocco. Left to her own devices she would have either died of exposure with a broken leg, wandered into Algeria or, worst of all, had to call on Loki to help her. 

So her sudden ability to teleport was incredibly useful as well as disconcerting. 

She caught herself on a fortunately very sturdy lamp sconce in her hotel room. The air she had displaced when she arrived gusted, blowing curtains, knocking over a spindly vase, and sending a blouse she had left on the back of a chair flying across the room to hit a wall and slide slowly to the floor.

Claire looked up from where she was grooming herself in the center of the queen-sized bed while Nora slowly turned around, taking in her surroundings before shouting at the cat, “So why did I have to drive you everywhere if you could do that?”

Then her stomach burned and roiled and she barely made it to the toilet before she started vomiting, noot stopping until she felt like she had ripped up her stomach muscles.

Claire padded in to sit in the doorway and watch her as she rinsed her mouth. 

“So I’m guessing that’s probably why?” she gasped out. Claire meowed once and jumped up to bat at the running water. 

Nora took that as a yes.

She knew she should take a shower, since she reeked of throw up and nasty demon sex and smoke, and she should probably drink a full bottle of water, since now she was dehydrated. 

Instead, she stepped out of her now very painful heels and crawled onto the bed still otherwise dressed. “I’ve had a very bad day,” she whined to no one, since Claire as a cat and didn’t care, and Loki was a bastard and hopefully on his way back to Chicago, before falling profoundly asleep.

“Oh, goddess, you look terrible!” 

“Thanks, cousin. Remember this moment when you have baby food in your eyebrows and are wearing stained running pants and haven’t washed your hair because those things are teething,” Nora answered, pointing at Maura’s distended belly as she dropped into the seat across from her, eyeing the massive lunch that was taking up most of the four-top in the hotel’s more casual restaurant, which was still far more elegant than she felt comfortable with that morning. 

Maura, who was in the glowing stage of being pregnant and had been living in Thomas’s manor house for a while, looked very comfortable and beautiful in her loose white linen dress, her wild hair almost tamed by a Hermes scarf. “Did you leave after the breakfast buffet or just slide straight into this?”

‘“I’ll have you know that after an early and almost sensible breakfast for three I attended a lecture on component substitutions using household items, and signed us both up for that class this afternoon about talking with animals. You’re welcome, by the way. How did it go?”

“Which part?” Nora said, thanking the waiter from the bottom of her heart for her coffee, agreeing to “discover the lunch menu” that he offered her. She decided quickly on the croque monsieur, more coffee, and declined to visit their pastry library, mostly because she wasn’t sure she could have heard him right when he said that.

“The part where you were going to meet with the Sabbat! What do you mean which part?” Maura practically shouted. 

The polite murmurs of the more elegant witches stopped for a moment, looking surprised at the outburst. Then, noticing Nora glaring at all of them since she basically hated everyone BUT Maura at the moment, looked politely away.

“I had a very fucking interesting morning.”

Nora explained, while eating her lunch and drinking most of a pot of coffee, about the waiting, Baba Yaga’s high handed if unsurprising behavior, Loki’s grand entrance, (Maura cut in at that point, “Oh, I saw they were replacing the doors. I thought one of the larger familiars might have been naughty. I guess maybe that’s what happened…”), his being a demonic twatwaffle, their trip into the mountains, and her teleporting.

Maura’s mouth was actually hanging open.

Nora had always thought that was just an expression.

Finally, she whispered, “I know I should be asking about the teleportation, because that’s brilliant, but what do you mean by ‘demon cock’? Wasn’t his cock demonic, and for that matter angelic, before? And before you answer, I apologize for asking, but I am just horny like you can’t believe all of the time now.”

“It was like this… “ she spread her hands, “and there were these ridges, and I think… No, that’s not right… Listen, I’m pretty sure I saw a dildo that looked just like it online somewhere - which I’m going to have to ask him about when I’m speaking to him again - I’ll just send you a link. But more important than the only part of Loki I still like at the moment, do you know anything about these tests Baba Yaga was talking about?”

Maura shook her head, “No. They’ve managed to keep all of that stuff secret, probably because it’s so rare they have to replace a seat.”

“Shit. I was hoping to prepare for how I was going to throw it.” She looked around, “Do you think that pastry library is a real place or just a metaphor, ‘cause I think I do want some cake.”

“It’s real, and glorious. I thought you changed your mind and wanted to join the Sabbat after all? It’s a massive honor.”

“No. I was just mad and wanted to hurt Loki. But even if I was single I wouldn’t be interested. I’d have to buy grown-up clothes and be dignified. And travel more.”

“Baba Yaga isn’t grown up or dignified, and Helen Mirren is married.”

“Baba Yaga could turn this building into a cheese sandwich, and Helen Mirren is the four thousandth consecutive reincarnation of an Assyrian love goddess, so allowances can be made.”

“True. Then we better hope that teacher for the animal language class knows her shit if you want to be sure to know how to mess up the right way,” Maura said, giving a significant look to Claire, who had joined them and was lapping at the butter dish.

Sadly the class in animal speech was fascinating but not of much practical help, especially when the teacher - an androgynous, gold eyed teenager named Jx - started their lecture, “It should go without saying that none of what we are about to go over applies to cats. They choose who they talk to and how and nothing you say or do will matter.” 

Nora was nervy and exhausted but when she returned to her room she couldn’t sleep. She tried to tell herself that was good, that the more tired she was the harder she would fuck up the test to come. 

She tried not to think about Loki, knowing if she did she would worry about him and start to reason out why he’d been fifty pounds of dicks in an out of control car careening towards her, and then would recognize that for all that he was an ancient supernatural creature of still great power, intellectual genius, and a master of emotional manipulation, his own emotional intelligence when it came to love and relationships was that of a cranky toddler in need of a baggie of Goldfish crackers and a nap. 

Finally, punching the fancy pillows a few times she gave up and went to take another shower before heading to the first test.

Loki walked back to the hotel as a punishment to himself. He loathed hiking, nature, and dirt, and the Atlas mountains had all in abundance He kept his wings tucked away as to not frighten or cause an accidental religious conversion in anyone he might run into. 

At some point he manifested clothing for much the same reasons. 

By the time he’d stumbled over the nine thousandth rock in his path, torn his favorite and tightest silk t-shirt on a palm, and had actual, real mud in his hair Loki had begun to think that atonement was not for him. 

As he walked he tried to think of what he could possibly say to Nora, what words she might even allow him to finish before deciding to try and literally banish him from her presence. Not that she would be able to. His state, as one of the fallen but no longer entirely one of the damned meant he was immune to banishment. 

That being true, he fretted a little bit at exactly how purely demonic he had been in his little performance for Nora and Baba Yaga. Was it possible he could be anathematized yet again if he were to behave too badly? 

Being pure demon again would mean that no matter how fond he was of Nora, how precious and desirable he found her, his love would curdle into mere lust and deadly obsession.

He stopped and looked at the blue and gold of the sky above, a brow raised, “I promise, it would be a mistake to take her from me, either through condemning me to perdition or for any other fashion. I would transgress beyond your divine nightmares, daddy dearest. Lucifer would crawl up to heaven to beg you to  _ do _ something about me. Promise.”

“Then I would suggest you stop being a horse’s hindquarters and go beg Nora for forgiveness,” Thomas said, rounding a boulder, straightening his vest and brushing a bit of dust from his grey tweed suit jacket’s pristine sleeve.

Loki crossed his arms, “How did you find me, wizard?”

“Maura again risked herself and our unborn children to report about the madness going on, so I used this to track you,” he said, flourishing one of Loki’s feathers from his pocket. 

“I don’t recall giving you that,” Loki snarled. 

“You didn’t. It’s from when you were molting all over Nora’s living room last winter.”

He snatched it from Thomas’s hand, rather too easily. “You have more, do you not?” he sighed.

“You’re too powerful and sadly too entrenched in my life for me to not have gathered everything I can to use against you should I have to.”

Loki wanted to be angrier than he was, but it was a backwards kind of complement and he didn’t really have the will to fight Thomas. He was far too miserable to enjoy it which was a waste. “Fine. Enjoy your ill-gotten gains. Shouldn’t you be back in England puttering around your garden and tinkering with a terrible vintage car that will never work right like all of the other old rich men in your country?”

“I’ve decided that my old man nerves can’t live with Maura marching into the mountains to use her phone so I am going to the hotel as well. Baba Yaga can kick me out herself if she doesn’t like it, but my guess is you are going to be such a nuisance she’ll barely register my being there.”

Loki thought about it, “I can almost guarantee it.” He gestured towards the path, “Shall we?”

Not sure how to interpret what Josie had said, Nora left the testing room, or what she had thought was the testing room. It had been weird even for witchy stuff.

She and the other two candidates - Matsuko and Prisha, a middle aged British witch who looked almost as unhappy to be there as Nora felt - had been told to sit down. There were only three chairs in the room, lined up facing a blank wall. 

Josie McClelland as the most recently added member of the Sabbat was the one to explain what they were to do, which she while handing each of them a lump of unrefined crystal, a piece of ginseng wrapped around with rosemary, grapevines, and gold wire, and placing a silk thread with an elaborate knot around their throats like necklaces.

“When I leave the room will be darkened. Using the structure of the crystal you are to project a thought onto the wall. Something real. A memory. It doesn’t matter what it is.”

With that, she started to leave.

Nora was confused, “Wait, what? That’s it? No more instructions? Isn’t this kind of important?”

Prisha also seemed to think it didn’t seem like much of a test, but Matsuko just closed her eyes and readied herself.

Josie thought about it for a minute, “Nope that’s it. See you soon.”

Then left and the room was plunged into darkness.

Almost immediately on the wall before Matsuko, there was a wave of white light, then purple, then a virtual rainbow, then an image coalesced out of them of the colors. It was a young girl, clearly Matsuko, creating tiny figures out of clay. There was no magic involved, and the clay was the bright, artificial stuff that little children loved. 

Then it was gone.

Next, Prisha’s crystal glowed faintly and with no preliminary on the wall appeared a river flowing slowly. It was massive, with grey and green water, and banks barely held in on the sides, so sharp that you could practically smell the ozone and hear the lap of its wake.

Again, it was there for a few seconds and then gone.

“Right,” Nora mumbled to herself, trying to think of something to project when, without any effort or extending of thought or power on her part, on the wall, looking like a bad old 8mm film rather than Prisha’s window-like perfection or Matsuko’s dream scene, was a blue car driving away.

And like the other two, it was gone nearly as quickly as it appeared.

The lights came back on and they all exchanged confused looks. Matsuko frowned, “I was trying to think of my grandmother at the Obon dance.”

“That was not what I was hoping to project either,” Prisha said, not volunteering what she’d tried to manifest.

Nora shrugged, “I had nothing. Certainly not my dad’s old Corolla.”

Josie entered again, walking in front of them, taking the crystals and ginseng, “Leave the silk around your necks and we’ll be in contact about the next part of the test.”

“This was not the test?” Prisha asked, sounding annoyed.

Josie smiled blandly, “I didn’t say that. Goodnight, ladies,” she said, leaving the room quickly, so by the time they were in the hallway she was long gone.

They all shrugged helplessly at each other, “Good job, I guess?” Nora offered.

Matsuko ignored her.

Prisha nodded, “Yeah, you too?”

In the elevator Nora started to fall asleep standing up. When she looked at her phone she saw they had been in the room for three hours.

“Fucking magical bullshit…” she muttered to herself.

Wondering if her credit card could handle the price of room service, or if she should just eat the bag of almonds she’d saved from the plane and go to bed, Nora let herself into her room. She’d barely gotten the door open when Claire streaked out, her tail high, an intent expression on her little face.

“Don’t leave the hotel, there are animals tougher than you in those mountains,” Nora called after her aunt. 

“Your aunt is doubtless a match for any creature stalking the Atlases.” Loki’s dark, velvety voice came from inside her room. “But I think she is intending to assault the coyote one of the witches here has as a familiar. It was very saucy with her earlier.”

Nora hung on the door, gently tapping her forehead on the wood. “I thought I told you to go home,” she said, not entering and trying to decide if she should go and sleep in Maura’s room. 

“I thought you knew me better.”

Of course, he was there. She should have told him to stay and he probably would have left for Chicago before she finished talking.

“Good point,” she answered, entering.

Though she had been expecting to find him naked or nearly so, sprawled on her bed, his hair splendidly disheveled, his penis massively erect - in other words the way she found him almost every time she returned home - Loki was sitting on the deep window sill looking down at the courtyard garden. He was even fully and rather conservatively dressed, gold slave bracelet aside, in a very soft looking green sweater, a pair of black jeans, and ankle boots. His wings were tucked away wherever they went when he wasn’t flying or presenting. Even his horns were unbedecked. 

They weren’t even polished, as far as she could tell.

His lifted his head a bit but didn’t look at her, “I’ve come to beg your forgiveness.” His voice was dull and sad.

Nora crossed her arms, “Ok, go ahead. But don’t crawl over here or kneel at my feet or any of that drama that you love. I want a proper, full apology in words.”

Loki nodded, stood, and wiped his hands nervously on his thighs which was almost enough to make Nora run and hug him. Loki was never nervous. Even when things were going terribly he might rage or brood but his hands never shook, he never broke a sweat, his sang froid was arctic.

It seemed to take him a very long time to walk across the room, and even longer to say, “I am so ashamed of what I said, of what I did. I can barely stand to look at myself.”

Nora’s heart started to beat hard and fast and possibly even irregularly. Loki was never  _ ashamed _ of  _ anything _ . It was against the Incubus’s nature to even acknowledge the concept of shame. The idea that he wouldn’t be able to look at himself was even more impossible. She’d seen him actually give himself an air kiss in the mirror after brushing his teeth or hair or just passing a window, or any other reflective surface in which he saw himself.

He went on, “I beg you to forgive me. Not for any of the reasons I might give. You already know them. I’m vain, and selfish, and have never had a relationship of any kind despite having fucked my way through entire civilizations, I’m half human loathing angel, half human destroying demon, and I am utterly terrified of you. You could destroy me with no effort and barely a word.” He looked at her and started to speak more quickly, “Also, I had spent a day with Thomas and you know he … Nevermind that. I have so many excuses. But I don’t want you to take any of those into account. I want you to forgive me when you think I am worthy of your forgiveness, and in the meantime I will do whatever I must to earn your trust again.”

He looked so earnest and worried, it was adorable and so unnatural on his face it was like he was wearing a costume.

Nora smiled at him, just a little. “Ok.”

Loki cocked his head, his eyes a little narrow, “Ok, what? Ok, you will let me earn forgiveness and absolution?”

“No, ok, I forgive you. I need a shower. I feel all… gritty or slimy or something after that test. I don’t suppose you ordered food, did you? I’m starved and beat,” she said, starting to unbutton her blouse, “and I really can’t afford much on the menu but maybe-”

Before she could finish Loki had grabbed the phone and started ordering an obscene amount of food, speaking in French which was almost enough to make her forget her exhaustion and starvation so she could drag him into the shower with her. 

She was about to tell him to add a side of toast to whatever he was getting when she was gone.

Loki felt a gush of foul thaumaturgy at his back. Spinning, his wings spreading should they be needed, daggers of fire manifesting in his hands, he faced an empty room.

The woman woke up in an alley.

She knew it was an alley. 

She knew it was dirty, and she was too. 

She knew that she was in a city. She could hear that much. And she knew what a city was.

She knew what a city was, what an alley was, what dirtiness was. What being hungry was. What being tired was. She looked down and knew what jeans were, what an Oxford shirt was, what running shoes were.

She looked up. She knew what morning was.

She looked around and knew what dumpsters and cigarette butts and trash and other people were.

She just didn’t know who she was.

  
  
  
  



	4. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.”  Roald Dahl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nora's gone, no one is very happy about it.

Maura, eyes bleeding rage, threw the other witch at the wall.

No, Thomas corrected,  _ into _ the wall. A little way into at any rate.

The hotel was quite well made.

Meanwhile Loki, radiating righteousness and fury in equal measure, had manifested the spear he had welded when still an angel and was stalking through the halls of the hotel kicking open doors with wings trailing fire, howling for Baba Yaga to show herself.

Thomas had decided to leave him to it and follow Maura, not only because she was his beloved wife who was massively pregnant with their twins but because for the first time he was genuinely frightened of Loki. Not that Maura wasn’t terrifyingly dangerous when possessed by the battle-spirit of the Morrighan, it was just that he was fairly convinced that she wouldn’t turn it on him. With Loki, he had no such conviction.

“Where. Is. My. Cousin?” Maura gritted out as she held the Sabbat member who, Thomas gathered, had administered the test to Nora shortly before she disappeared in a puff of black magic. 

There were two problems with the witch answering. One was that Maura was holding her aloft against a wall by a forearm pressed to her throat so the shorter woman’s feet kicked helplessly at cracked plaster. Fortunately being a Sabbat member meant the witch was extraordinarily sturdy or she would have probably been dead already.

The other was she had actually said, “Cá háit. An bhfuil. Mo. Col ceathrar?” and he was guessing by the confusion added to the distress on the woman’s face that she didn’t speak Irish.

Thomas put his hands in his suit pockets and sauntered over to help. With a wrinkle of his nose, he cocked his head and smirked at the witch, “Allow me to translate. We want Nora back. Now.”

The woman tried to respond. He could tell she was really, really trying her hardest, her mouth opening and closing, her hands desperately and fruitlessly pulling at Maura’s arm. Thomas let her swing for a bit. Just because he wasn’t extravagant in his display didn’t mean that Thomas didn’t care. 

Quite the opposite. He had been fond of very few people in the world over the centuries and Nora was one of them. When the more conventional methods - scrying, aetherial tracking, necromancy, geomancy, blood calling, even the Google Marauders Map, which was nearly foolproof - had failed to find her Loki, Maura, and he had silently agreed that they could all do their worst.

“Let her down, pet. I assume she’s trying to be helpful since anything else would be very stupid.”

Maura stepped back, letting the witch fall. “Talk Josie, or I am going to rip your spine out and beat you to death with it.” Her voice was like a crow’s wings beating against a storm.

Thomas idly wondered if she could actually do that. It was possible, but it probably wouldn’t be good for her. Sometimes the goddess forgot that Maura’s body was not as indestructible as her own divine flesh. 

The witch - Josie, he supposed - knelt, coughing and holding her throat for a minute. Maura stepped closer and she fell backward, flailing her hands, clearly too frightened to even think of using her magic, especially since it hadn’t stopped them when they first found her in the empty conference room where the testing had taken place, typing furiously on a laptop. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to any of them,” she rasped out, breaking down into tears.

When the goddess was on her Maura was incapable of compassion, but Thomas could feel the sincerity of her words. “What do you mean? You lost all of them?”

Still not getting up, Josie shook her head. “No. The test was… Matsuko thinks she’s five years old and is locked in her room, scared and screaming for her mother. And Prisha has turned into some kind of water guardian. We had to put her in the largest tub in the hotel and she barely fits. None of this was supposed to happen.”

Thomas could feel the goddess starting to leave Maura, bored and not as useful when there wasn’t someone around to beat the hell out of or murder. In her own voice, she asked, “What was the spell supposed to do, then?”

“Magic suppressing spell, witchling, powerful but not… weird.” 

Baba Yaga had walked in behind them. She waved her hands around, dismissive and disgusted, “And no. No, the spell was not supposed to do any of these things. It binds the power, hard, not a namby-pamby binding but some heavy-duty shit. Then we send girls somewhere alone and they have to unbind themselves without help or herbs or whatever. We know where they are so we can see how they do it, not just how fast. No way that it could turn into three separate clusterfucks on its own.”

Thomas considered, “So the test must have been tampered with somehow.”

Baba Yaga gave him a slow clap, “We are so lucky to have a big, small wizard man here to tell us what we already know. Yes, some fuckers tampered with the fucking spell. Brilliant.” She turned to Maura, “I can see why you threw away a magnificent future for this.”

Thomas refused to be baited. He knew that the ancient Supreme was furious and abashed at what had happened to her witches. “If she hadn’t she might be suffering from the repercussions of the same tampering.”

Maura stayed on point, “What have you found out about the tampering? Stay down, Josie,” she said blandly, “you administered the test so you should have seen something was wrong.”

Baba Yaga nodded. “Agreed. You fucked up Josie. I don’t like that.”

Josie hugged her knees and said nothing.

“The spell bound their memories instead of their powers. Matsuko’s got bound back to childhood. Prisha’s got bound back to a previous reincarnation. Nora’s… Nora’s just got bound entirely.”

“But why is she gone if the others are here?” Maura asked.

“Why?” Loki’s voice was without affect. 

He stood in the doorway, no iron-tipped hasta in his hand, his hair limp and dirty looking, his wings gone, his eyes no longer burning but empty, other than his horns he might have been just a man. 

A lost man. A grieving man.

“Ah, your  _ tempter _ tantrum burned out then?” Baba Yaga stopped, waiting. “Oh, come on,  _ tempter _ tantrum? He’s an Incubus? Bah, you all don’t know from funny. Fine. No idea, demon boy.”

“Is she dead? Did it kill her?” Loki, still blank-eyed, his voice still emotionless and flat, crossed the room. “Why can’t we find her?” He grabbed Baba Yaga by her arms. 

He kept repeating it over and over in that empty voice.

It gave Thomas chills. 

In one room there was one of the first fallen angels in a semi-dissociative state, the most ancient and powerful witch in history, the avatar of a Celtic war goddess who was very hormonal and had just lost her favorite family member, and himself, the last great wizard of the English tradition who was terrified for his children, wife, and friend, oh and a panicky and possibly villainous member of the Sabbat.

Josie was the least powerful person in the room and even she could blow up the hotel if she wanted.

The last time he had felt that kind of fear was during World War II, the fear that came from knowing there was too much eldritch power in one space in a time of stress and that the devastation was incalculable. 

He tensed, waiting for Baba Yaga to set it off. 

Instead, she reached up and touched Loki’s face, capturing his gaze, “She’s not dead, Loki. You would know. You always know.”

Thomas frowned. What did that mean?

Before he could ask, Baba Yaga took Loki’s hand, “C’mon, little angel, let’s go find out what’s going on.”

The main ballroom of the hotel had been transformed into a witchy control center. 

Tables were set up with every magical element used by witches, all volunteered by the attendees wanting to find out what happened to their missing sisters.

A library’s worth of grimoires were on three tables, being pored over by a group of older brujahs lead by Evelyn Hechizo.

The herbalists had taken custody of the ginseng that had been used in the testing. Under the direction of the legendary trans witch Gillian Corey the roots had been carefully unwrapped from the rosemary and grapevines, but the gold wire had been kept in place. 

The crystals were in the other corner of the room, each held by a very young witch, each of whom was being supervised by a very old one. 

In the center of the vast space there was a circle of witches, each dressed in ceremonial garb from various traditions. Within their circle Matsuko sat, temporarily placated by a variety of action figures and a plush llama, and what looked like a large, child’s wading pool where a type of naga - half gorgeous, blue-skinned human woman, half river serpent - circled slowly, glaring at everyone.

“Anything?” Baba Yaga asked a young woman who bustled up with a clipboard and a frown. They talked quietly in Tagalog for a few moments. 

All of the witches left what they were doing to converge around their Supreme, save those circling the other two afflicted.

Loki walked to the table of crystals, trying to find himself, understanding that the witches had found that the test had been deliberately cursed but that it has gone awry and the result was not what the cursing power had intended.

He loomed over the table of crystals, which seemed very far away. He knew immediately which crystal was Nora’s and that the young witchling holding it was getting nowhere with trying to find its secrets.

He longed to touch it. To hold it. To press his lips to it. But he knew that memory magic was fragile and dangerous. That the line between bound and erased was a fine one. 

Still….

Before he could stop himself he reached out to stroke a finger along its smooth side.

“SO WE KNOW NOTHING? I SHOULD EAT EACH OF YOU STUPID CHILDREN!”

Baba Yaga’s roar stopped him.

In a very old form of Russian that probably no one in the room could understand but Loki and a few witches who specialized in languages she harangued, insulted, and scorned her coven as a whole and individually. 

Alphabetically.

She had just started on the witches whose names began with ‘C’ when the ballroom doors burst open. Helen Mirren, Josie, and another member of the Sabbat entered, dragging two others who were bound in sinew and mistletoe. 

“Supreme,” the incomparable Helen said, her voice calm, her hair perfect, “I think Lilly and Madiha might have some answers for us.”

Baba Yaga’s eyes grew narrow, and she stumped her little legs over to where the two witches lay in a heap. She snapped her fingers and a chair slid across the room so she could sit down, hands on her spread knees, and lean over them. “Ah, I understand now.”

“Supreme,” the one called Lilly said, sounding very reasonable, “I know that this looks bad but I can explain-”

Loki sensed politics.

Politics took time. 

Before he could intervene Baba Yaga snapped her fingers. The mistletoe turned into wild roses, their thorns in some very unpleasant places. “Don’t bother. I know a coup attempt when I see one. Undermine my choices, make me look weak, then fuck up the testing of some of our most promising witches - ones who have no loyalty to either of you - and blah blah blah. 

“The problem, bitches, is that you forget I have no problem killing you.”

The vines started to tighten.

“Wait! The missing witch! She time traveled,” Madiha cried out. “Something to do with her memory projection! She teleported to what she saw! It shouldn’t have happened!”

Baba Yaga nodded, “True.” 

Then the vines took them.

They had called her Jane, because that’s what they called all of the unidentified women, even those who couldn’t identify themselves. 

But she hadn’t liked that. 

She wanted something totally amazing like Angelique but the Polish nurse at the hospital where they had checked her out and kept her for a couple of days because of exposure had laughed at that. “Ok, Angie.” By the time she left everyone was using it, and her discharge papers said, “Angela Doe.”

They could have at least put down ‘Angelina’ she had thought, annoyed. 

Still, everyone at the hospital had been really nice. They’d gotten together some money to start her out with, and one of the orderlies had helped her get a room at the SRO he lived in, and one of the ladies who brought the meal trays had gotten her a cleaning job at one of the high rises not far from the hospital.

With a bag holding the clothes she’d been found in, a hospital t-shirt that her doctor had given her, and some shampoo and toothpaste that housekeeping had snuck to her along with some magazines, she had left dressed in scrubs and the weird running shoes she had on to begin with.

In her upper pocket were the numbers of a few of the nurses from her floor, who made her promise she would call them if she ever ran out of food.

Spring had barely started then. Now it was almost Halloween and the wind howled down the canyons of the city. She pulled the black sweater she had bought at Goodwill closer and wrapped the muffler around her throat. It was bright green, and she’d taken it from the garbage of the office building and washed in her bathroom sink.

“Angie,  _ chica _ , we’re heading out. Breakfast or no?” Luis called out to her. 

“Breakfast for sure,” she called back, giving herself one more look in the mirror. 

Her hair had grown out in the months since she’d been found so it brushed her shoulders. She didn’t know who she was, but she knew she wasn’t Angie. Sometimes she tried to make herself think of herself as Angie and it just gave her a headache.

Her face still meant nothing to her. It was rather plain, with its nobby chin and stubborn jaw and brown eyes, and still looked more grown-up than she felt.

She laughed at herself. Of course it did, she was only about eight months old.

In the months since she’d been found by the cops in that alley she had learned a lot of things.

How to clean a toilet so it gleamed and mirrored glass so there were no streaks and clear glass so it was practically invisible.

That when taking the El home alone at night she should sit in the first car because the driver had a phone.

She liked to wear black, and reading the newspaper every morning, and watching old musicals, and preferred her coffee black and she never, never passed up going to a diner for breakfast after working all night because breakfast was the best.

Sitting at breakfast with a crowd of people was actually the very best because the table filled with plate after plate of bacon and pancakes and french toast and coffee cups and eggs and toast and orange juice and tea and fried potatoes made her feel…

It made her feel  _ something, _ a something that she couldn’t name but that ached beautifully in her chest.

The walk to the diner as the sun started to find its way between the towers of the Loop was quiet, most of their crew too tired to talk much. She just liked the hush of the streets. A few ambitious, early morning joggers staying at the hotels in the area were up and heading towards the lakefront, few cars were moving yet, other than the odd patrol car or taxi, but the only real break in the softness of the sunrise was the rumble of the trains overhead. 

When it was like this, in the magic hour of dawn or its twin at dusk, she felt almost normal, as if she might be just like everyone else and not empty. It was lovely. She loved it.

She also had found she loved books and music, especially when singing along, and drinking whiskey, and old houses, and one afternoon when she was sleeping before work she woke up from a dream she couldn’t remember out of breath and humping a pillow and she found out she really loved coming, which meant she found out she really loved masturbating.

She wondered if she loved having sex with other people. Then she wondered if she’d ever had sex with other people. Then she curled up on her little bed and cried so hard her eyes burned for the rest of the day.

Also, she loved pork chop sandwiches.

It was cool enough outside the diner’s plate-glass windows were blurry with condensation. Inside, the warm air smelled of all good things and it was early enough that only a few tables and three of the stools at the counter were occupied.

Jean, the owner’s wife who reigned from behind the register, nodded at them, a happy smile on her heavy face. She loved the regulars. “Anywhere, sweethearts,” she called out while making change.

The Fountain was an old place, with worn linoleum and duct tape patching on some of the booths, but everything was clean and the food was exactly as it should be. 

They pushed two tables together. She sat on the end with her back to the door, between Luis and his cousin Marta who bickered comfortably over which of them would be taking their grandmother to the cemetery for Dia de los Muertos this year. “Uh uh, baby, I took her last year,” Marta said, shaking her hand in the air and then ordering silver dollar pancakes.

The woman who they all called Angie but wasn’t really anyone loved listening to them fight, while the rest of the table gossipped and bitched about the Sox and the Bear’s upcoming season, and Mayor Daley, and President Bush. They knew better than to include her in the conversations, that if she had something to add that she would.

Mostly she remained quiet because everyone else seemed to have a filter that she lacked, something that kept her from blurting out anything that came to her mind, even things she wanted to keep to herself. Most of them were kind about it, knowing it couldn’t be helped.

Only their supervisor, Anthony-never-Tony, rolled his eyes when she couldn’t stop herself.

It had been worse, he used to laugh at her, saying, “Crazy say what?” but the last time he had for some reason the lighter he had been flicking flared upwards burning one of his eyebrows off and he’d looked at her funny ever since.

She sipped coffee and smiled to herself while enjoying the cousin’s warm arguing.

“Like hell you did. I took her last year. And the year before. You kinda young to be forgetting shit already. Denver omelet with bacon on the side, please.”

“And you are crazy if you remember it that way, cousin…”

The door opened behind her back and the rest of the table fell quiet. Jean said, “Take the third table by the window,” so they weren’t regulars who could be trusted to seat themselves properly.

Iwona snorted, “ _ Turyści, _ ” to her daughter Blanka, who muttered something about people slumming.

Then the food arrived and everyone ignored everything but eating, everyone starving from a night of hard work and wanting to finish quickly so they could get home and do whatever they did in their lives before catching a little sleep and starting again.

She had plans to go to the library before going back to her room.

“Excuse me,” a voice said from beside her. A voice like how she felt when she drank whiskey and its burn made her muscles ache as they relaxed. A voice like venom and honey. 

She looked up. And then up some more.

The most beautiful man in the world was looking down at her, pointing at the bottle of hot sauce next to her arm. “Might I borrow that? Our waitress seems to have forgotten.” His accent was sort of like something from Masterpiece Theatre and sort of like something she’d never heard before.

A lock of the blackest hair in the world fell in front of the greenest eyes in the world and he brushed it back into place with the most graceful and oh my god big and long hand in the world. 

She stared at him for a while.

The table fell silent.

He was very expensively dressed.

She stared a little longer. 

“Um, or maybe not,” he said.

She reached blindly for the bottle, knocking it over. Luis put it in her hand. She offered it up to the most beautiful man in the world with the blackest hair and the greenest eyes and the biggest hands and the most flawless skin and the leanest hips and the broadest shoulders and… and… and.

She said it before she could stop herself, “You sound like poetry.”

Then she dropped her head into her hands and moaned in embarrassment, “I can’t believe I said that. What does that even mean? Take your hot sauce and go. Go before I say what your eyes look like.”

From the corner of her eye she could see him crouch, gracefully, so gracefully, next to her chair, “Erotic poetry, one would hope,” he said with a slow smile, his eyes lazily taking her in.

At the other end of the table Blanka whistled. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turyści - Polish for tourists


	5. There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.- Marie Antoinette

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki tries to behave.

After he had gotten the bottle of sauce Loki smiled again, laughing a bit shyly, looking down and then back up into embarrassed, confused brown eyes, then stood up turning back to the table by the window. The role he had created, the man he was playing at being, would be a gentleman and not stay when the young woman was distressed.

He reached the table and the smile fell from him like a painting falling from a bent nail, his hands squeezed the bottle and the glass groaned dangerously. Before Maura or Thomas could speak he shook his head, “No. Nothing. Nothing.”

His stomach was knotted and sick, there was misery like illness poisoning the ichor in his veins, the marrow of his bones. Angels could not sicken, they could be injured unto death but their flesh was inviolate from disease or contagions. But sick he was.

Maura touched his arm, “We knew that. It’s fine. It’s fine. We have a plan and its a good one.”

The glass cracked. Red liquid oozed between his fingers, dripping onto the formica top of the table. 

Twenty-six years in the future….

Time travel was impossible for scientists. For magic wielders and some arcane beings such as angels, merely difficult and irritating. 

Unless, Loki thought, you were his vexatious lover who managed to effortlessly move in time AND space as an unconscious defense mechanism against a curse. 

The witches working on the crystals had managed to unlock the memories that had been used to trigger the curse against the three Sabbat candidates. The other two, Loki had not paid attention to their names, were a birthday party and a past life regression. Bringing the first one around had not been too difficult. Her grandmother was in attendance at the coven meeting and she rocked the girl and sang to her in soft Japanese to keep her from flailing about mentally and disrupting the spell.

The naga had been a bit more difficult since it did not want to give up its existence. However, they were benevolent protectors and it was persuaded that the woman who it had become in a future life deserved her existence. She had been able to help with her own return.

Baba Yaga had been her usual comforting self to the two distressed, confused witches, slapping them on their shoulders and pointing at the two corpses still being consumed by wild rose vines on the ballroom floor. “Now there are three open seats, lucky girls.”

It had taken all of Loki’s not very substantial patience to not explode in swords, fire, and harsh language as they finally found their way into Nora’s memories, projecting it onto the wall.

The back end of a blue car was driving away, the image rather grainy.

Baba Yaga turned to the assembled hundred witches or so, “Anything?”

Silence.

“Play it again. Slower this time.”

Still the back end of a blue car driving away.

“Now?” she asked.

Silence, then a small voice said, “It’s a Toyota?”

The queen of hags pinched the bridge of her nose, “Ah, well, that’s clear then. Thank you for that. It’s a Toyota. That’s fucking important I AM FUCKING SURE!”

Loki was gratified that at least she was starting to be stressed as well. He looked to Maura who shook her head, her eyes big, “Means nothing to me.”

Baba Yaga said, “Again.”

The image came up and Loki could not stand to see it again. Getting up he paced behind the assembled witches who huddled further forwards away from him, as he was starting to smolder again, leaving scorch marks on the parquet floor. 

Again and again, uselessly the memory played.

Then Loki realized they were all idiots. 

On the table of grimoires, Claire was laying in a circle on the open pages of a priceless, fully illuminated codex from the 12th century, some of the gilding having flaked off on her paws. Now and then one of her ears twitched.

Loki picked her up. She protested with her claws. He lifted her to face height and growled at her, the low, yowling growl of a tomcat about to tear apart an interloper on his turf, his fangs glinting in the low light. “Do not think to test me, Auntie. If we don’t find Nora I am going to use you to line a pair of slippers and walk through hell in them.”

“Mew?" She said.

He plopped her into Baba Yaga’s arms. “You two old biddies were friends. If she’s going to talk to anyone it will doubtless be you. Should anyone know the meaning of this bit of my treasure’s mental ephemera its this fleabag.”

Thomas actually struck himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand, “Of course. How stupid.”

His annoyance with himself was the only light in Loki’s darkness.

Baba Yaga and the street cat eyed each other, “Claire? You look good. Better than the last time I saw you. Cⲁϫⲓ!” she ordered in Coptic.

The cat sighed raspily, “You know how hard it is to defy the feline imperative to inscrutability? You think I haven’t wanted to help? I was sleeping on an old Norse invocation of Freya hoping one of you geniuses would figure it out. Move over to the wall, B.”

Now next to the image she pawed at the memory of the car. Specifically the license plate. “Illinois plates, 1993 sticker.” Then she stood up and flicked at something else, barely seen on the back window, “Parking pass for the University of Chicago. This is the year Nora’s parents went to work in Alaska, left her with me and then never came back.”

“What happened?” Loki asked.

He had never really asked Nora about her life before him. Her family, her school years, her work as a witch. He had treated himself as the only event of significance in her life. 

Maura answered, “They were part of a joint Wiccan/angakkuq endeavor to contact old gods to try and combat damage done by global warming.”

Baba Yaga nodded, “No one told the polar bears. It was gruesome.”

Loki shuddered at what Baba Yaga might find gruesome.

Handing Claire off to Maura, Baba Yaga turned and clapped her hands, “Ok, bitches, time magic, now.”

“I’m going,” Loki said.

Baba Yaga looked at him like he was an idiot, “Duh.”

“Me as well,” Maura said. Before Thomas could object she turned to him, “Nora is my doula. Do you really think I can have two magical babies without her?”

He rolled his eyes, “Fine. But I will b-”

“Fine. You all go. Make it a fucking party. Woooohhh! Exciting! Take the cat.” Baba Yaga turned and scanned the witches with the evilest and hungriest of eyes. “I stay. The plant food twins are not alone in that conspiracy. I have some housekeeping to do.”

The temperature in the room dropped. The courtesy pitchers of water supplied by the hotel iced over. Breath smoked from everyone’s lips but Loki’s and Baba Yaga’s. And the two vampire witches, needless to say. 

Thomas shrugged his suit coat off and put it over Maura’s shoulders.

A large number of the witches removed their sweaters and scarves, hopefully offering them to Helen Mirren. She took an angora wrap, patting the giver’s cheek. The girl walked away cradling the spot and swearing she would never wash it again.

Everyone moved faster assembling the time spell components, both out of terror and to keep warm.

Loki sat down and watched the magic happen, not really seeing it, but musing on how little he knew about Nora’s life. They had been together almost every day for a year, a few unavoidable breaks aside, and he could not have told anyone where she’d gone to school, for any of it, what her favorite birthday gift was as a child, who taught her to swim, who had been her first crush, was the old ten speed in the garage hers, did she have summer jobs as a girl?

Had he ever asked her anything about her past?

No.

Oh, he knew so much about her, but those had been things he had learned from their time together. Likes, dislikes, loves, fears, hates, important things certainly, but there was a selfishness inherent in even knowing those things, for they related purely to the end resulting in the woman who his lover and spared no thought for the journey that was her making.

And now she had lost that road herself. She was out there with nothing but darkness behind her.

When they found her, for they would find her, he would have to be so careful, so gentle. She would be brave and lovely, but so fragile with nothing within the shell of her to shore up the walls. Most likely knowing nothing of the secret world of magic and the strange that lived just out of the corner of most people’s eyes.

Back to the past….

The little group that Nora was eating with had finished and split their bill. He watched her stand and put on a thin black sweater, just barely warm enough for the October weather, tying a little green scarf around her throat. It was faded and had started to come unraveled and he could tell she was heartbreakingly proud of it.

When he had looked into her eyes she had been so open, so innocent, so unworldly. She had let a stranger see her whole soul because she had never learned how to protect herself.

With no one paying attention Loki burned the hot sauce off of his fingers and grasped the edge of the table, trying to hold himself in place. “We have a plan…” Thomas reminded him.

Nora left with the group. She stopped at the door and gave him a little wave and an embarrassed grin, mouthing, “Sorry.”

It was unbearable.

Maura put a hand on Thomas’s arm and smiled at Loki, “Fuck our plan. Go on.”

He was up, turning on his heel, his coat swirling in the air so he could put it on before the door had finished closing behind her.

The clique of them moved together down the street, and he gave a small jog to catch up with them. “Miss? One moment, please,” he called, stopping the run to walk slowly towards them, giving the kind of smile a slightly abashed, charming man would give a stranger he wanted to know better.

A smile that said, “I’m more afraid of you than you are of me.”

A smile that said, “I am so taken with you I find myself behaving out of character.”

That combined with his garments that said, “Trust me, I am an eccentric millionaire,” and the fact that it was the early 90s meant that her companions, who were clearly fond of her, thought it was perfectly acceptable to leave an utter naif behind with a stranger who was at a foot taller than she was. 

Were they back in 2019, one of the other females would doubtless be in his face, loud and hand waving, while the one male would posture and someone would have their phone out to take his picture as a creep.

In 1993, they all laughed and made suggestive statements and then said they would see her at work that night. The fact that the male stopped and said to Loki, “We  _ will _ see her at work tonight. Or I’ll find you,” offered a bit of comfort.

“Understood,” he said, giving him a small salute that seemed in character with the man he was pretending to be.

Nora stood waiting for him. She wore some kind of uniform under the little sweater, ugly polyester nonsense in beige with her name in embroidered script on the shirt pocket, her feet were crammed into a pair of monstrous shoes in a matching color, and she carried a plastic, drawstring bag in place of a purse. She reeked of cheap, detergent-filled soaps and her hair, which had grown long enough to be held back with a piece of yarn, needed to be washed.

And her neatly tied scarf.

She gave him a stout-hearted little smile, her eyes curious, and then looked down when he could not bring himself to speak.

Loneliness bled off of her, and poverty, and uncertainty. 

He wanted to howl.

“Do you like poetry?” he asked, leaning against one of the adolescent, yellow leafed trees lining the street, keeping physical distance between them in an effort to save himself at least some discomfort. His cock was furious and painful and his demonic and angelic natures were fighting amongst themselves. With knives. “As you mentioned it.”

“Oh,” she blushed.

She blushed. 

_ Nora  _ blushed.

It was adorable and it was all he could do not to touch her face to feel how warm her skin was, but he also hated it, for his precious witch never blushed. And he had really, really tried to make her.

“Um… I don’t actually know any poetry. I just… I say weird things sometimes. I’m sorry.”

She turned to walk away.

He said, “Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, / As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, /To taste whole joys. ... /To teach thee, I am naked first; why then /What needst thou have more covering than a man.”

Nora turned back, her head cocked to the side, a look of wondrous confusion on her face. “What?”

“John Donne. What a waste when he decided he loved God more than pussy,” he said, forgetting his performance for a moment until she frowned at him. “Sorry. That was quite rude.”

She stepped closer, and her smell of cinnamon and warm skin and untended-to needs made him nearly swoon. 

“That was beautiful. It sounded like your eyes.” She looked to the sky and shouted, “FUCK! Why Can’t I Stop Myself?” She hopped up and down in irritation. 

Loki laughed, a little relief roiling in his blood. That he had seen on more than one occasion. 

“I think you are a delight. Can I buy you a drink?”

She looked around, “It’s 7:30 in the morning.”

“It seems that you just finished work. Is that not when people normally drink?”

“I guess, but its-”

Ruthless and knowing the weaknesses that were a part of Nora’s very bones, he teased, “Afraid?”

Looking affronted she raised that stubborn little chin of hers.

He wanted to bite it. 

“No. It’s just not normal. I have trouble being normal. Knowing what normal things are. So I have to try really hard.”

Not with me, you don’t, he wanted to say. Instead he said, “What could be more normal than a whiskey after work on a cold day with a man who finds you fascinating.”

She snorted. 

His knees were ever so slightly weak.

The streets were now filling with the workers spilling from apartments and vehicles and several of them gave Nora odd looks as she stood there in her funny little outfit laughing. She saw them and stopped, again looking self-conscious. 

Behind his back, he twisted the fingers of his left hand. 

None of those bastards would be having an orgasm. Ever again.

“One drink. Please.” 

He held out his hand. 

She frowned, “One condition.”

“Anything.” He meant it. The Crown Jewels of England. The lost Amber room of the Hermitage. The head of literally anyone alive on the earth. His own heart, ripped by his own hand from his body. 

“Do you know any other poems?”

“Do I?” he stepped next to her, putting an arm about her shoulders in a chummy fashion, hoping his cock wouldn’t tear his pants open, and made a grand gesture outwards to lead her down the street, “More than you can imagine. How about,” he leaned in, talking to her as they walked, “As I would free the white almond from the green husk / So I would strip your trappings off, / Beloved. / And fingering the smooth and polished kernel /I should see that in my hands glittered a gem beyond counting.”

He caught her when she tripped over nothing.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem Loki recites at the end is Aubade by Amy Lowell


	6. If a man doesn't know how to dance he doesn't know how to make love, there I said it! - Craig Ferguson

She was very nervous. 

She was very happy.

It had never occurred to her that she could be both things at the same time before. She had been nervous so many times. The first three days she had… existed, she supposed, were terrifying. She would fall asleep and wake up and have to hold the hospital bed to keep from shaking because her mind was trying to find itself and couldn’t. 

It was made worse by the things it did know but didn’t know how she knew them. 

Like that she was female. She knew that right away. 

Actually, that had been about the only thing she _ did  _ know about herself.

The shaking hardly ever happened any longer. Maybe only once a week, or if she woke up in the middle of the night and it was too dark. Thankfully her job meant she mostly slept during the day, so that was ok. She told herself.

She had been happy, actually happy, sometimes too. Like when she had found out she knew how to read. Each book she took from the library, or even more the ones she bought for ten cents each at Goodwill, fell easily into the vast emptiness of her mind. When she read one she especially liked she wondered if perhaps she had read it before and then tried to convince herself that she was lucky.

How many people got to experience something they loved again for the first time?

She was also happy when Anthony-never-Tony brought donuts for their crew. 

The man - she had forced herself to stop thinking ‘the most beautiful man in the world with the blackest hair and the greenest eyes and the oh my god most graceful and BIG hands’ because it was kind of tiring to go through that every time she glanced at him - returned to the table holding a glass in each of those ‘oh my god’ hands.

He set a whiskey on the rocks in front of her before sitting across from her with his brandy. She was pretty tall and her feet were dangling a little, but his feet were firmly on the ground, and she remembered what Officer Perez and Detective Engel, and Doctor Turner, and pretty much every nurse and all of the women on the cleaning crew had told her about not being too trusting. 

She had wanted to tell them that she was an amnesiac, not a moron, but she had agreed to drink in the morning with a very tall man who she didn’t know, so maybe she was a moron after all.

Although, contrary-wise, being an amnesiac meant she didn’t actually know anyone. Herself included. 

He took a sip of his drink, grimaced slightly, and then looked about the room. “This is vile. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m sorry _ that _ is the best they had.” he said, gesturing to her glass.

Admittedly he and Rossi’s did not match, the old dive bar didn’t get many patrons wearing cashmere sweaters and designer jeans, at least 7:30 in the morning. The whiskey wasn’t so bad, she thought. Then again, she didn’t have much to compare it to. It was the only bar she had ever been to. But it felt comfortable, with its long, well-cared-for wooden bar, scuffed tables covered in thick, black paint, and its worn rug. 

It was rather exciting, to be in a dive bar. She’d heard about them in songs and read about them in books. The only bar she had ever been to was the sports bar near the building her crew cleaned. Twice, once when they had to work on Labor Day and everyone decided to take their break drinking Corona, and the other time they had gone for Luis's birthday. 

There had even been cake, then.

There were a few other night shift workers at the far end of the bar talking with the bartender, a grey-haired African- American woman making herself a cup of tea and a sandwich, about the Bears prospects, otherwise they had the place to themselves. She took a sip of her drink. The feel of cold of the liquid in her mouth and the heat the liquor spread through her always felt like something she should remember but didn’t.

“This is fine. I think,” she added. 

They were silent. 

His beautiful face was bent looking at the surface of his drink. Every now and then he would start to look over at her and then stop himself. 

That was fine. She liked looking at him.

Then he laughed, a strange, ratcheting sound that she found wonderful, though she could not imagine what was funny. She looked around. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he passed a hand over his eyes and was very still for a moment and then looked at her. “You must think I am entirely mad. I declaim poetry at you on the street, insist you come drink with me, and then sit in silence, all having not even asked your name.”

“Um…” she took another drink. Then another. This was an easy one. It wasn’t like she wasn’t constantly blurting out weird things so what was stopping her from answering. “Well…” she finished her drink. “I’m going to get another. Do you want another? Or something different? You don’t like that so I can get you a vodka, or maybe gin and tonic, or a beer, or wine… The wine here is probably terrible. I’ve never had wine, but I think it's supposed to be fancier than a place like this. That’s what it seems like from what I’ve read, anyway. So may-”

He reached out and put one of those long hands around her hand where it held her now empty glass. 

The ice cubes clinked.

She could not look away from his hand. 

No one had ever touched her before. Well, the doctors and the nurses, and the police officer who first found her, and sometimes someone would brush her shoulder walking past or on the El. But no one had ever intended to touch her in a non-professional capacity before and it made her blood turn to honey and bones go soft and her skin ache not just on her hand but  _ everywhere _ .

And now she knew that aching could be good.

“Calm down.” He took the glass from her and stood. “Allow me.”

Calm down? Ha!

Loki gripped the edge of the bar, waiting for Nora’s drink. 

He felt like he was about to rip the top off and throw it through a wall. 

His horns, hidden away, itched and burned to break free, his wings as well. 

Over his shoulder, he could see her sitting, looking around the bar to take in everything with wide eyes, her mouth slightly open, as if she were astonished by the glory of the place. Hypnotized by the neon Rolling Rock sign. Delighted and absorbed by the various cans available in the carry out coolers. Positively enchanted by the dirty ashtrays and the array of cheap bottles and the terrible, cd jukebox.

Apart from the ashtrays and the lack of craft beer and that longing look of gormless wonder on Nora’s face Rossi’s looked exactly as it did in 2019. 

The last time they had been here they had ended up fucking standing up in the miserable, dirty little bathroom because they could not wait. And it had been fucking. Not lovemaking, not having sex. He had held her off of the ground, her teeth deep in his shoulder, and he had left bruises everywhere he had grasped her.

Later, at home, they had made love and he had kissed and nuzzled every mark he left. 

His claws bit into the old wood. 

The bartender turned to look at him, her head cocked in confusion. Then she saw his talons and nodded, putting the drink down. “Ten percent surcharge for damages,” she said, her eyes briefly flashing bright yellow, a brow raised. She looked the same as she did in 2019 as well, but  _ Aziza _ were very long-lived.

It was one of their favorite bars for a reason.

He nodded back and handed over the money and then a healthy tip as well. 

“Angel,” she said when he sat down.

His heart stopped.

“What?” Did she remember? Could it have been so simple? The other witches had take-

“Angela. My name is Angela.”

Before he could stop himself he blurted out, “No it’s not!”

Fuck! Her condition was catching!

Rather than jump away or look surprised, she cocked her head at him, lifting her glass. She drank her drink through the little stirring straw like she had the first one, which he found both endearing and tragic. Around it, she asked, “How do you know?”

“Er… know what?” he asked, fiddling with the motor oil and sugar concoction that they called brandy in this pit.

“That Angela isn’t my name.”

”Oh, I just meant it doesn’t suit you… not that there is not a seraphic quality to you,” he added.

“Seraphic,” she repeated it twice, staring down to her right, then smiling at him, blinding him, “Seraphic relates to the Seraphim, the highest order of angels. I know that one!” she raised her glass and clinked his, taking another sip. Then her smile turned sadder. 

“Sorry. I know I’m weird, but I’m not crazy. People think I am, sometimes, or that there is something else wrong with me. There is. Just not what they think. I have amnesia. Which most people think is fake or I am faking it and just trying to get attention. It’s just rare, really, really, rare, especially the way I have it where I can’t remember anything about myself. Which is why you’re right. I’m not Angela. That’s just what they called me when I left the hospital. So it’s ok if you want to go.”

She squared her shoulders and waited for him to leave.

The spell to get him and the others to the past and onto another continent had taken four days to assemble even with the combined power of the witches. Once in Chicago, they’d thought they would find Nora easily but that turned out to be utterly wrong, hampered as they were by Thomas and Maura’s scruples about interfering too much with the past. 

They hadn’t even allowed him to seduce anyone out of the funds they would need or to find them a place to live while they searched. Finally, with no other ideas, Thomas called himself in England, explained the problem, wired himself a large amount of money, and then promptly put a spell on himself to forget the whole thing. All like the good little Boy Scout he was.

Even with that taken care of they had been weeks looking until Maura, using the creaky technology of the time, managed to hack into the CPD and find a report that led to breaking into the University of Chicago hospital records that took them to a wretched transient hotel in Old Town where they had found Nora. 

Impulse control was counter to Loki’s very nature, so it had taken all of his own strength and a little magical aid from Thomaura to keep him from swooping across the street and probably traumatising his already mentally wounded lover forever.

The plan had been for Maura - who was female, vastly pregnant, and had that pretty accent - to befriend Nora. Win her trust. 

But when they had entered the diner and he saw her there, sitting at that table of people, barely speaking, her expressions flickering between bewildered, amused, and sad, his fortitude ran out and their plan along with it. So now he had to rein in his impulses yet again, but with her much, much closer, making it much, much harder.

“Why would I want to leave? I’m fascinated. Were you in an accident of some kind?” He leaned closer across the table, his shoulders forward. His wings wanted to pop out and shield her and they hurt like hell to hold back.

The grateful look on her face was agony. “No. I mean, I don’t think so.” She leaned back, cradling her glass in her hands. “When the police officers found me, or I found them, I don’t remember that part very well, I was in this alley and my blouse was open but I didn’t seem to be hurt. My head was ok.” She ran a hand through her hair, lost in thought, and the bit of yarn it was pulled back by came away. “Then they took me to the hospital. It's the one not far from here, and they checked me out and… I know what you’re wondering about,” she looked down.

He was certain that was not true.

“I wasn’t… I probably wasn’t raped. Or, they said I could have been raped but it hadn’t been right then. I didn’t have any fluids on me, or in me, I guess they meant. I was very scared then so I don’t really remember much about when they were examining me except that I was freezing. The hospital is always freezing. There are sick people there, so that doesn’t make sense to me, but what do I know? Not much, because like I said I can’t remember anything from before then, which is why I don’t know if I was raped. There wasn’t any fluid, there was some bruising, just a little bruising and soreness in... in, er, places. You know. Of course, you know. Why am I talking about this? And there was a bruise on my waist, and my palms were scraped but it had all started to heal. I hated it, the examination, that much I do remember.” She nodded, looking at him, “I don’t think I was raped. They think I was. I don’t think so.”

Loki kept his expression concerned and thoughtful whilst inside he screamed, thinking of the last time they had been together. Of his dragging her away into the mountains and fucking his anger and panic into her, pressed to the mountain, furious in her return. It was no wonder the authorities thought she’d been raped. 

Nora, who didn’t know she was Nora, finished her drink. “You don’t want to hear this. No one does,” she said, putting down the glass, standing. “I don’t know who I am, or what I know, I wasn’t raped and there isn’t anything wrong with me, I just don’t know who I am or what I know, so it makes me blurt out things and wake up scared. Thank you for the drinks, they were good and so was being able to look at you without having to pretend I wasn’t looking at you. I stare at people a lot, trying to see if I remember them, but you, I just stared at because who wouldn’t? Goodbye.”

Wrapping the handle of the plastic bag she carried around her wrist she was out the door with Loki close behind. 

The narrow sidewalk in front of the bar was now crowded with people heading to work, so it was a moment before he could catch her at the corner. “Wait! Please…”

The pedestrians, subconsciously picking up on the strain coming from them parted like the Red Sea about them, leaving the two of them a little bubble of space to themselves.

He put out a hand, “I know you are not truly Angela, but I am Loki.”

Tentatively, almost nervous, she touched her hand briefly to his, shaking once and then slowly pulling away. “Hi. You can call me Angela anyway.”

“No, I cannot. Will you let me see you again tomorrow?”

"Why?"

He leaned on a streetlight, smiling seductively - though he had no other form or smile, anything else on his lips was a smirk or a sneer - and spoke slowly. “For the general reason one person wished to see another.” He leaned a little towards her, whispering, “You may not have your memories, but I am guessing you know that much.”

She looked tired and defeated. “Why? There isn’t much more to tell. There is no record of a me anywhere, not Chicago, not Illinois. Every now and then they get a report - a missing persons report that could be but when they fax my picture and information, it's never me. I live in shit-hole, I work cleaning all night. Every few weeks the case officer assigned to me calls to make sure I’m ok. Every month I call the police and they tell me that even though I’m a missing person no one must miss me because no one is looking.”

She laughed a little and walked away.

Loki could not move for a moment, fighting as hard as he could to not manifest in hellish fire and angelic wings. Then he scrambled to follow her. Across the street was a sort of paved park near a glass office building. He stopped her again, trying to smooth his voice, stay calm, stay gentle.

He wanted this to be over.

He would take as long as was needed. Years if need be. Forever if he must.

“You disbelieve me?”

She looked at him and shrugged, obviously attempting to be cool, “I don’t think that we are a natural pair, you and I, that’s all.”

Why had she told him what she did? Now he felt sorry for her. Clearly.

He frowned at her. Holy everything but he was beautiful! Something about the way his eyes narrowed and his lips thinned made her want to run in the hope he might decide to chase her. “What do you mean by that, exactly?’

“Well, you,” she made an elegant gesture towards all of him, implying grandness, “and me,” she finished with an impatient flap of her hand. “It’s like harnessing an Arabian stallion with a goat. A goat that barely remembers its a goat. They aren’t even the same thing.”

She walked up to him, ignoring his fuming, and put her hand on the top of her head and then stepped back to not quite touch where it came to on his chest. If she actually touched his chest she was pretty sure she would combust and be transformed into a pillar of ash in seconds. “The size thing isn’t even that inaccurate.”

Snake-quick, he grabbed her hand and pressed it flat against his very firm chest, holding it there. His heart beat fast and hard beneath her palm. She started at it, her skin touching his linen shirt under his coat, feeling the heat of his own skin, so intense it almost burned, his long, long fingers spread over hers, trapping them. It was impossible to look away from his touch, which she knew made no sense.

As far as she knew it was the most erotic moment of her life. 

He leaned over her, still holding her hand in place, one lock of his hair coming loose and stroking her cheek, “My heart races for you.” His voice was tense, not like its usual teasing purr. “Do you know how difficult it is for me to play the angel at this moment, precious? That I am fighting my basest and most compelling instinct to keep from sliding your sweet hand lower, and lower, so you feel for yourself exactly how much I want you.”

She gulped, her own heart pounding. What the hell was going on? Things like this didn’t happen, did they?

“Let me buy you breakfast tomorrow, or a coffee at least.”

He was overwhelming and she had no mental wherewithal. She nodded.

That night they teased her mercilessly, but when they left the building and saw him waiting for her, his breath piping in the cold, false dawn grey, holding two large cups of coffee, they fell silent.

He took her for a walk on inner Lake Shore Dr., eating pastries as they walked, drinking coffee, asking her question after question. About what she had found out she knew, for instance.

“I found out I speak Spanish, pretty good, actually, and can read it, too. Um… Cats like me. Like really, really like me. Whenever I’m out walking if there are cats around they always come to see me, with their tails high? And they bring me things. Mice and birds. One brought me a $20, crumpled up in it’s little fangs. He was my favorite. I knew it was a ‘he’, somehow. Oh, and I love the library.”

She bumped him lightly with her shoulder, “I looked you up.”

His heart felt jagged, from the little bump, from her words. “Looked me up?”

“Loki. I KNEW I knew that name! He’s a god, right? A troublemaker, no… what’s the word? What’s the word? Trickster! He’s a trickster. I read all about him. Your parents must have a weird sense of humor. Are you from Norway or Sweden? Or Iceland? I looked up those, too. Is that your accent? Because it’s … you know what I said before.”

Loki snorted into his coffee, loving the sound of his name in her mouth. “I am originally from rather far north, you could say. At any rate Loki is more of a nickname.”

“So what is your real name?”

“Gelusael.” He said it slowly, hoping.

“Oh, that’s much worse,” she said thoughtfully. 

Not able to stop himself he put an arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head, laughing.

She froze.

He stepped away, “I am terribly sorry.”

“It’s ok. I haven’t been touched much. Would you kiss me?”

They were in a little park where the road curved gracefully. Loki felt a very great desire to jump and punch the air like a ridiculous mortal. “Certainly.”

She turned to him, closed her eyes, and lifted her face, puckering. Perhaps he should have simply pressed his equally puckered lips to hers but no.

He took the coffee from her hand, placing both of their cups on the ground, and leaned down, whispering, “Relax.”

She opened her eyes, “Relax?”

“Your lips to begin with. Like that,” and before she could speak again or tense up or take on any other ridiculous postures he put his mouth to hers. 

There was no shock, no start, he was gentle, he was slow, he let her move towards him, just a step in so they met more and more and oh to feel her sweet mouth all unknowing and open and curious for him and he wanted his love back so terribly and this innocent tasted like her and looked like her and sounded like her and smelled like her but she was not his Nora his treasure, but she was  _ a _ treasure and he treated her as such as something precious and when her hands found his shoulders to hold herself up he allowed himself to put an arm about her waist and oh she was seeking and learned and he let himself be her textbook, her classroom, her library, and he knew that there was spot on the tender inside of her lips that would make her shudder and push closer and now he was ruthless and he licked her there and her body pressed to his and the wind from the lake was cold so he used his free hand to wrap his coat about her as well.

Loki rested his forehead onto hers, and she touched a lock of his hair that had come loose. She rubbed it between her fingers. “It  _ feels _ black.”

The next day she was very tired, but she let him give her a ride home, though she was embarrassed by where she lived. He wanted to ask her a million questions and the irony that he was dying to hear Nora’s stories now that they had been erased was not lost on Loki.

Because she was tired, she leaned against him in the back of the cab and fell asleep. 

He shifted so her cheek lay on his chest and he paid the driver to circle the block four times.

The next two days she had off. He talked her into letting him take her out. 

As ever, Thomas glared at him and Maura interrogated him for every detail. 

“We are running out of time, Incubus,” Thomas said, looking significantly at Maura’s expanding belly.

She placed a protective hand over it, “We are fine. We have ‘til Halloween. I can tell. They are going to be witch babies for sure.”

“That isn’t much time.”

But she refused to worry, “It will be fine. I know Nora. Even if she doesn’t know herself.” She ticked off on her fingers, “The closer we get to Halloween the more her powers are going to manifest even if she doesn’t know that’s what’s happening. She’s too curious to not want to find out what’s happening to herself. And it’s almost their,” she pointed at Loki, “anniversary.”

Loki put his hand to the doorknob to keep Thomas from seeing him shake at that memory.

He took her dancing.

At first, she was afraid, but she let him buy drinks and then it was the best idea she had ever heard.

The bar was dark and hot and crowded. She wasn’t sure she knew how to dance but he did. Oh, he did. He wrapped her about him, and him about her, pulled their hips tight and moved.

They played the song that had been everywhere all summer. The one she liked so much.

_ “... _ _ I can feel it in my bones _

_ I'm gonna spend another year alone _

_ It's fuck and run, fuck and run _

_ Even when I was seventeen _

_ Fuck and run, fuck and run _ _ ..” _

“Ah, the Incubus national anthem…” he breathed against her ear, her neck, made her body feel vivid, more full of color and need and alert yet languid. A word that she had not known she knew the meaning of until that moment.

The feel of him, the heat coming from under his clothes, the silk shirt, the painted-on jeans, singed her skin and melted her muscles to the point where he was holding her up.

Sinuous - another word she now knew she understood not just the meaning but the intent of - and slow he moved them backward, backward through the crowd that made way for him. She noticed that happened a lot. If he went up to the bar for a drink suddenly there was space, no matter how many people deep it had been before. When he hailed a cab others who might have been waiting first would just let him have it.

The whole world seemed to defer to him.

It made her want to defy him.

He nudged his thigh between her’s, rubbing slightly.

It made her want to defy him later.

Her back was against the wall next to the payphone that she knew no one would dare to try and use for as long as he held her there. Suddenly shy, she focused on where his chest heaved under his soaked shirt. 

His one forearm rested on the wall above her head, his other hand lifted her face to his, “It’s ok, it’s ok,” then his mouth brushed over hers and pulled away. 

He was the whole world at that moment, and he looked at her as if she were the one who was the whole world. She always wondered what he was looking at when he looked at her. She certainly never saw it herself. When she looked in the mirror there was just a face and some hair and her neck and nothing else.

First, they just made out. Like kids. Hungry and serious and lost to anything but the feel of each other.

Then her hands were on his hips and they were practically eating each other. He snarled her hair, she bit him, he pressed his thigh again between her legs and said something she couldn’t hear over her own breathing and sparks of pleasure throbbed from where he rubbed against her and she was certain she had soaked through her panties and even through the black skirt that she had gotten at Goodwill earlier that day because she had nothing to wear to dance. 

They were putting on a show but she sensed that no one would dare to watch.

Everyone was scared of Loki.

Everyone but her.

The song changed to something slower. 

They remained frenzied. He lifted her and her legs wrapped around him as if they had been made for that, as if their bones were meant to fit together. The contact of the constrained ridge of his cock against her… her… her cunt, that was what it was, not her womanhood, or flower, or any of those stupid things they called it in the books she read so she could read about sex, at least not right then. Right then it was her cunt and it was swollen and aching, that good ache that she had discovered when he first touched her hand, and when the ridge of his cock pushed against it she wondered how she was going to live remembering this.

When she broke away from his mouth so she could speak he latched onto her throat, to the place where her shoulder met her neck and every bit of her fell apart.

“I’ve never… er, ohhhh,” she tried to make words. “I don’t know if I’ve ever done this before?”

“Frottage? Not to worry. You seem to have the hang of it,” he said lightly. Then he growled, his teeth grazing her collarbone, “Now grind!”

Her eyes fluttered closed and she obeyed, using her hips in a way that seemed more natural than not and he caught her yelp of surprise with his mouth.

“I… I mean… I mean…” she babbled, grinding harder, knowing she was going to come, torn between embarrassment and needing it. “I mean I don’t know if I’ve ever had sex.”

He stopped moving, setting her on her feet, and she wanted to cry. “No, it's ok, I probably have, I probably have.”

He touched her face, gentle again, which was the last thing she wanted just then, feeling swollen and wet and miserable. “Precious thing, even I would not utterly debauch an innocent for the first time against a wall in this revolting place.”

“I didn’t think it was so b-” she gasped out as he reached under her skirt, under her panties, and stroked her clit with one long, firm finger.

“Nor would I leave one in such distress…” His voice was sibilent and darker than she had heard before, “Now hump my hand like a good girl.” 

Long fingers parted her, long fingers entered her, long fingers fucked her while his palm rubbed sweetly and she bucked against it, tightening and tightening and moving faster and faster and making sounds. He somehow, not moving, not saying anything, made her look at him, let him see. 

He was avid and a strangely cruel smile crossed his lips.

When she came her legs crossed so she could ride out every last bit of pleasure so he had to hold her up. She buried herself against his chest. Loki kissing her temple, her cheek, her hair, telling her how adorable she was, how delicious, how glorious.

Something dripped onto the top of her head. Sweat, she assumed.

Moving slowly, he freed his hand and when she looked up he was sucking his fingers and his eyes were red.

Two fine rivulets of blood rolled down his face from the top of his head where -

Where -

Where there were -

Where she saw - 

No.

She pushed at him, squirming from between him and the wall and backed away.

He licked his lip, seeming to notice the blood pooling there for the first time. He reached out, “I can explain.”

It seemed to break the spell that kept them from being noticed and everyone in the little sweatbox of a club seemed to turn.

Everyone was looking.

She disappeared.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the summer of '93 in Chicago you really couldn't get away from Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville.


	7. Beauty and the Devil are the Same Thing - Robert Mapplethorpe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki and the woman who was Nora have a conversation.

“Yes, fine, everything is my fault. But can you find her?” 

Loki was trying not to shout at Maura. 

It was very difficult. 

It was very,  _ very _ difficult to not yell in a sort of general way at everything. 

The house they were in, for instance. The street outside. The late-night sky. Himself, certainly. Thomas, most of all, as he had been exceptionally acerbic at a time when Loki was already doing a perfectly respectable job berating himself.

Yet Thomas insisted on helping Loki, good friend that he was. “You really could not control yourself at all? I thought you weren’t a demon any longer, demon,” the wizard said in a tone both huffy and superior, which was not easy to achieve.

Loki scraped his hair back, bumping his horns that were aching miserably and flaking a mix of dried demon blood and angel ichor off of his face. He hadn’t bothered to clean up yet as he couldn’t make the damned things retreat. So after terrifying Nora and all of the other patrons at the bar - except the ones who just thought they were tripping balls - and everyone on the street, he had just given up, shot his wings out and flown back to the house that the three of them had rented. 

Thomas was displeased at that as well.

“You’ll be lucky if she didn’t teleport to Siberia to get away from you!” the wizard raved, his hands in the air.

Loki flew out of his chair and stood toe to toe with Thomas, snarling, “Listen you bastard, she looks and sounds and feels and smells and tastes EXACTLY like the love of my life. The ONLY love _ ever _ in my life. Who is for all intents and purposes gone and may never come back to me. I have hardly been sane for a while now due to all of that.  _ Add _ that she is a complete, unstained, untouched  _ for all intents and purposes  _ innocent. Who is gaaaagging for it. Do you have any idea, any scrap of a notion, what that is like for even a half incubus? Any incubus? Especially me?”

Thomas’s jaw jutted out and Loki could see from the corner of his eye that he was reaching towards the back of his waistband, where he kept his wand. 

“Do it, wizard…” he sneered, his gladius burning in his hand before he knew he’d called for it.

They stood, frozen for a few moments, then Thomas turned away, “Go wash your face.”

“I found her!” Maura sang out from where she was scrying with a button from one of Nora’s blouses hanging from a piece of her own hair. “She’s still in this time, in Chicago. It looks as if she hopped back to that hotel she’s staying at.”

“That’s good. That’s good. You better go get her, horny, we got new problems and no time to fix them,” Baba Yaga said.

They all looked up, wondering how she had gotten past the various wards and alarms they had placed around the house. 

“When did you get here?” Loki demanded.

“Now,” she said. “What, you think I made a Starbucks run and then came by? Actually, that sounds not bad. Wizard boy, you go get Baba a grande mocha with six shots and a couple four squirts of peppermint. Demon boy, you go get cleaned up and then get our lost lamb. Don’t scare her too bad, but subtle is off of the table. Mama Witch, you put your feet up, you did good.” 

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the crystal containing Nora’s memories, holding it up for them all to see.

Before the crystal had been milky white and solid. Now parts of it were clear and there were cracks.

Carefully, so carefully, Loki took it from her and cradled it in his hands. “What’s happening to it?”

Baba Yaga plopped herself on a sofa and picked up a copy of Vogue, “T’ch! The 90s. So much fucking plaid. What happened is that those stupid bitches weren’t just stupid bitches, they were CHEAP stupid bitches and used cut-rate materials for their little curse. That thing is falling apart. If it fractures all of the way through Nora’s memories are going to just be an aetheric puddle soaking into the rug. Metaphorically.”

“Maura,” he whispered. She nodded, hurrying over and let him slip the crystal gently into her keeping. 

“If we need her to cooperate with the spell-” she said.

Not looking up from the fall fashion edition, Baba Yaga shook her head, “No time for the best-case scenario.” Then she did look up, frowning at Loki, “Maybe take a shower, though. You look like a what a serial killer has wet dreams about.”

Rather than waste time, Loki burned away the blood, the dirt, the mess in his hair, and his filthy clothing. Because he no longer had to hide himself he dressed as he preferred rather than as a dull mortal. 

Thomas eyed him, “Subtle really is off of the table, I see. Here,” he tossed Loki a long, black suede coat, “so you don’t get picked up for soliciting. What are you going to do to keep her from just teleporting away from you a… fourth time, wouldn’t it be?”

Loki lifted his hand. 

A pair of velvet-lined iron shackles with silver locks hung from his thumb, then he turned and in a flash of wings was gone.

“So, what’s the progress on that mocha?” Baba Yaga asked Thomas, still flipping through Vogue.

She was in the street in front of the Carling Hotel where she rented her room week by week. 

She had no idea how she had gotten there. 

Then her stomach burned and she barely made it to the dying, nearly leaf-less bushes that someone had planted ineptly in hopes of making the rather forbidding and beaten-up front of the old, stern building look friendlier. 

Her vomit would probably not improve their health, but the poor things had probably been thrown up and pee’d on so many times already, she doubted her contribution would make a difference.

“Baby, are you ok?” 

Sitting on the bench near the street was Larry, the accountant who lived on her floor. No one knew why someone with a proper job chose to live in the Carling and when asked, he evasive. He was enormously fat, with the darkest, warmest skin, and a very handsome face, and was one of the only neighbors who talked to her regularly. The rest of them either spoke to no one, looking at the world with either suspicious or haunted eyes, or would mumble ‘retard’ when she tried to make conversation in the elevator.

“I don’t know,” she said, walking shakily over to sit next to him. “What are you doing out here? It’s late.”

He handed her an actual handkerchief from his pocket, “Rent must be paid. You keep that hankie. I’ve got more.”

“What?” she wiped her mouth.

He laughed, “Sorry, baby, I always forget how sweet you are. Actually, I am waiting for a gentleman of my acquaintance who rang a bit ago for what in the vernacular is referred to as a booty call. What have you been up to, coming home all sweaty and tossing cookies? You been a bad girl tonight? Other than your breath you sure smell like you had a good time.”

“I don’t remember,” she whispered, hating to even half-lie to Larry. She did not remember how she got home, and she was very afraid of what she did remember and what it meant. 

“Were you with that very attractive, clearly well-endowed boy who dropped you off last night? He looked quite upscale, which is not to say he wouldn’t be a motherfucker. In fact, it makes it more likely.”

“I was.”

Larry turned and looked at her seriously, “Did he hurt you? Because I will fuck him up.”

What could she say? No, he was wonderful and then he turned into the devil. Actually the devil, with horns, and she screamed and then she was home. “No, nothing like that.”

“Ok, then,” he patted her arm and stood, a bright red, very large old car pulling up to the curb. He sighed, “Being strictly dickly myself I can tell you that there are days I wish I liked pussy. Men are the worst. Don’t let him hurt you, sugar. Now get inside, drink some water, and clean up. You’re all manner of disgusting.”

Only the night watchman was in the lobby, dutifully watching a horror movie. Halloween was tomorrow and someone had half-heartedly decorated, with a few old paper skeletons and ghosts, and a lot of fake cobwebs that blended in nicely with the real ones. There was a bowl of candy at the desk, in case any of the neighborhood kids decided to stop in the scariest building in the neighborhood.

Thankfully no one was in the elevator so they wouldn’t have to put up with how bad she smelled. Or would ask why she was shivering.

Because she knew that if anyone asked she would blurt out, “I was at a club with this very beautiful man and he had his hands in my panties, and then he turned into the devil, with horns and he was covered in blood. And then I don’t remember anything until I got home. Also, my head and my stomach hurt a lot. A lot, a lot. Or I hallucinated it and blacked out, or maybe he gave me drugs. Or I have a brain tumor and that’s why I can’t remember anything before eight months ago but the doctors never thought to look for one. I'm very scared, no matter what it is. Can I have a hug?”

Part of her wanted to throw out the black skirt and t-shirt she wore that night, not to mention the panties and bra, but she couldn’t afford to, so she folded them and then shoved them into the bottom of her laundry bag hoping that by the time she got around to washing them the memory would be faded. It took a long time to get any hot water in the tiny, clammy shower and it never lasted long so she sat wrapped in a thin towel on the toilet, waiting and shivering more.

She licked her lips and tasted something sweet.

Standing to look, she saw that there was a smear of something purple on her upper lip and near the corner of her mouth. It tasted of plums and salt and something musky but sweet, and she couldn’t remember what it could have come from. 

Then she realized, it was the Devil’s blood.

She got in the shower, ignoring the cold.

The Devil was waiting for her when she finished drying off and walked out of the bathroom with dripping hair, wearing the old, very long, hooded sweatshirt she used as a robe. 

There was no doubt about him being the Devil, or her having a tumor or something else wrong with her brain. The long, ivory horns curved slightly and had glintingly sharp tip were a giveaway, as were his wings that arched black feathered and magnificent where he slouched in the largish window that was the only nice feature in her terrible room. Somehow around them wore a black coat, under which she could see he was shirtless with a gold and ruby nipple ring, with black leather pants with a lot of straps, thigh high boots with heels, and his longish nails were painted dark green.

Hanging, swinging slowly and ominously from the thick leather belt that held those low slung pants onto his lean hips, were a pair of fancy looking handcuffs. The sight of them made her touch her wrists, as if she’d done something bad before, because she could swear she knew what they would feel like.

He was turned away so his hair, which was much longer now, hid his face. Then he turned and his green eyes had shimmers of fire in them that she could see even from across the room.

There was a part of her that wanted to go over and kneel so she could put her head in his lap and let him stroke her hair with those nails. 

Also, she wanted to run.

Her terrible room that looked even dowdier and more depressing with him in it. The scuffed and worn linoleum floor, the shiny, polyester cover on the low, single bed, the blond not-wood dresser and desk, the one, black pleather chair and her few thrift-store buys, some old books, a green glass vase, two velvet throw pillows all made her miserable most of the time but she hated them right then.

He was staring at her and she fidgeted from foot to foot, her toes cold but she didn’t want to step onto the rug next to the bed because it would take her rather close to him. “Er. I am going to ask you something weird. If the answer is no please don’t be mad at me. Do you have horns and wings? Because I could be seeing things, I know that. And if I am, then I am sooo sorry for screaming and running away.”

He shook his head, giving her a sad smile. “I have horns. I have wings. Your mind is perfectly sound, amnesia aside.”

His voice, the voice that sounded like poetry, sounded even more so, deeper and more hypnotic, as if the horns, the wings, the burning eyes let him breathe.

“Though a psychotic break, or something else, might say that.”

With a rueful laugh he nodded, “And yet this,” he motioned to himself, “is all quite real.”

“Are you going to kill me? Or steal my soul? Or just do something terrible to me? Are you sure you aren’t a hallucination? What are you?” She wondered if she was going to cry.

“A fallen angel, my precious girl. Your fallen angel.”

She felt herself nod and then walked to the tiny closet, went into it, closing the door and then sitting with her back against it. For once she was glad she didn’t have much in there, just her uniforms and a jacket.

“Is that like a naughty person’s guardian angel? Was I bad before I lost my memory?” she called out.

She heard him stand and walk across the room, his booted heels ringing on the tile. There was a slight sigh and the door jostled slightly but he wasn’t trying to open it, rather he had seated himself on the other side, his back against the wood as well.

“No, no, in no way. You were, you  _ are _ , so very far from bad. A witch and a treasure. You are so good, in fact, so kind and generous that you redeemed one of the most unworthy of creatures, winning his heart when he had no idea that he possessed such a troublesome thing.”

“Who?” This was certainly not what she was expecting. She had thought she was probably a customer service worker.

Now he laughed, “Me, precious, me.”

“I still think this is a hallucination. Too much Halloween stuff, I was so excited to find out I liked Halloween stuff, I was going to buy a pumpkin, but now I think that may be a problem for me. Oh and maybe some brain damage that the hospital missed. I don’t feel good.”

She could imagine him looking around her room in horror before speaking, “Living here? I am sure you have been exposed to everything from yellow fever to Cotard’s syndrome. The diseases of love alone that I have sniffed out infecting this place are vile and rampant. Let me take you away.”

They sat like that for a while. She wanted to move away from the door but she was still cold and she could feel his heat through the thin wood, so she turned a little to huddle against it, not wanting to reach up and pull down her jacket. The rattle of the hangers would be more than her nerves could stand, she was too close to screaming as it was. It would probably shred her muscles as well, they were so tight.

If it wasn’t for that heat she would have thought he had gone, or that she had just stopped hallucinating for the time being. Best to be certain, she thought, shaking against the door, not wanting to move to wipe her eyes. 

Then there was soft scraping, and then clicking, of claws on the wood and he started to speak again, his voice a dark hush. 

“I must tell you that were you in possession of your memories you would be astonished at the restraint I am showing. The gentleness and restraint towards you. The enormities I have committed against you for even lesser offenses than hiding from me in a closet when you are sick and frightened have been terrible indeed. And now, when you are sick and cold to deny me the luxury of caring for you? What a good boy I am not overpowering your body or your will, just sitting here patiently and waiting for you to come to me. When you are restored to yourself I will expect you to lavish me with praise and thanks.

“I imagine I will be waiting quite a while for them, of course. But since I have discovered these great wells of patience within myself it will be quite simple to do so. I will happily wait for you for as long as it should take.”

She could picture him sitting on her floor, his cheek leaning on the door, his dark green talons softly scratching at the door, his wings like a magnificent cloak spreading on the linoleum. 

Gulping, her voice half gone with fear. “I don’t believe you.”

“No, it is true. I am normally very impatient. In all things other than the erotic. Then I have a patience that plate tectonics would envy.”

She found herself giving a little, hiccupy kind of laugh, “Mean I don’t believe I’m a witch of any of that.”

“Your name is Nora Walsh.”

The way he said that name made her close her eyes.

“You are a witch from generations on generations of witches. You are brave to the point of foolishness-”

“Not right now…” she interrupted.

She could hear the smile in his voice as he continued, “You were raised by your aunt in a little house on the South Side after your parents died by polar bear, your dearest friend is your cousin Maura who has excellent taste in ancient goddesses and dreadful taste in husbands and is very pregnant and very worried about you. You hate the Cubs and their fans, people going into the fifteen items or less lane with more than fifteen items and have often gotten into fights over this besetting sin. And the smell of hollyhocks, though I know not why. You love black coffee, whisky, the sound of wood cracking, old records, having your nipples teased with lily petals.” She felt herself blush and those parts of her go painfully hard.

He continued as if he hadn’t just mentioned her nipples, “All types of cake, singing, Mary Gaskill, Roquefort on pears, and for no reason that anyone understands, me.”

There was a peculiar hitch in his voice, like a snag in velvet. 

It made her chest hurt. Or that might have been oncoming pneumonia.

When she could speak again she answered, “That all sounds wonderful. It would be very … restful to know what I liked and that I had a best friend who was worried, and that I had lived in a little house once and that I had… you… but none of it means ANYTHING to me.” Then she added, “I sing? In front of people?”

“I’d say like a lark, but the lark is a crow to you, in my ears.”

“Oh.” She touched her sore throat. Now and then when she was cleaning she would start to sing to herself but would stop whenever any of the rest of the crew was around. She didn’t need there to be any more reasons for people to think she was weird, even the ones who were nice about it.

When he spoke again there was a little calculation in his tone, “But you do concede that you are not hallucinating me and my occult trappings?”

“I… yes, I suppose so. No, I do.”

He opened the door and she fell into his arms.

He stood with her cradled against him, she was powerless to move, partly from exhaustion and partly because her muscles had all unclenched at once. He seemed even taller than before and it wasn’t just the boots. Or the wings. He smiled down at her, a touch of fang showing, “Your hair is wet. You’ll catch cold,” and as if he had sensed her thoughts from before he stroked his long fingers through her hair, his claws tenderly teasing her scalp. The heat from his skin dried her hair as he petted her and she found herself leaning forward so her forehead touched his bare chest.

God but he was burning beneath that skin and she could not get close enough to him.

“I need to get you somewhere more comfortable, and as subtlety is off the table…”

With two long strides he was across the small room, had picked up the coat he had discarded at some point and tucked it around her, and with a flick of his hand the glass from her window melted, dripping down into a slippery puddle on the floor. 

“Hold on, treasure,” he whispered against her hair, kissing it three or four times. Not knowing where else to hold, she wrapped one arm around him and clutched some of his hair for good measure. Tight.

She was certain he started purring, which did something very nice to her overwrought nerves and other parts as well.

Then they were on the windowsill and then they were in the air and then they were flying.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Larry is based very much on my beloved friend Larry Warren, who was the accountant at a bookstore I worked at for many years. Larry hated being outside and whenever I would run into him on the corner waiting for the bus or a ride and I asked how he was he would sigh in a very aggrieved way and say, "Rent must be paid. Rent MUST be paid." He really did live at the Hotel Carling, and he one time made his brother who was visiting from New Orleans kneel to me and kiss my hand because queen's must acknowledge other queens. I miss him very much.


	8. I’ve done a few things in my life that I'm not proud of, but this is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell. - Stephen King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki Does as Fallen Angels do.

Nora - who was not Nora yet or again - curled hard against Loki with a small, distressed sound, hiding her face against his chest, pulling his hair to hide in, shaking. He hated himself just a bit for the pleasure he took in how close she was, how right she felt against him when she was clearly not herself, when she was obviously afraid.

When they flew, which was much of the time, Nora would normally perch on the crook of his arm, raven-like herself and egging him on to dangerous stunts.

What would happen if he were to fold in his wings? How long would it take for them to unfurl again as they fell?

How close could they skim the water without her boots getting wet from the icy, grasping lake?

They should climb very high so she could jump and he could dive through the air to catch her….

The last he never agreed to, no matter how often she asked. And she asked and asked, sweetly, laughingly, seductively, even around a mouthful of his cock. 

“Do you have a barely secret deathwish, precious?” he had asked, carefully stroking her hair behind her ears, so he could enjoy how her cheeks hollowed and the muscles of her jaw tensed as she worked on him. 

Afterward, curled against his side, Nora had whispered in his ear, “No deathwish. I just want to see the look on your face…” She snorted and pointed at his nose, “Almost as funny as that one…” 

She had laughed that ridiculous laugh of hers until he rolled her onto her belly, slithered down her length, and licked her asshole and fucked her with his hand until she screamed for mercy instead. 

He had briefly lifted his head, patting her bottom fondly, “Now why would I have mercy on someone who has so little respect for my ancient, frayed nerves? Be a good girl and take your punishment like the powerful witch I know you are.” He had thought for a moment, “That little squeal you made about an hour ago was quite adorable. What did I do to cause that? Was it this?”

Looking at the shivering, lost creature he had cradled to himself, Loki’s longing for Nora was like a ball of sick and rusted wire revolving slowly within his chest. “Worry not, precious. We haven’t got far to go and I’ve never dropped a stray kitten yet.”

She looked up at him, her eyes dark and enormous, and then out at the city, its perfect grid of golden lights extending everywhere save the dark mystery that was Lake Michigan at night. “It’s beautiful,” she said, her warm words clouding the air. Leaning forward just a little, she let the cool wind blow over her, smiling a little, in a gesture he had seen many times before, though she did not know it.

“Indeed. All the more so for it not being the intent. It is simply meant to be practical but it dazzles. This said, I am glad that you fear falling more than you fear me.”

At that, she lifted her head farther, an achingly familiar frown drawing a line between her eyes, “Oh, I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid of losing my mind.” Then, thoughtlessly, she put a hand up and touched one of his horns. He hid the very un-incubussy gulp he gave at that little touch, but when she softly and slowly ran the veriest tips of her finger up its inner curve he thought she would get to see what he looked like when they fell from the sky. 

“If I am going crazy at least my hallucinations are gorgeous. And warm.” She skirted her fingers across his hair and to the other horn. For whatever reason, the left one was ever so slightly more sensitive than the right and he was already hard enough for his cock to punch a hole in reality and fuck it, so being careful not to let her feel unsupported, he freed a hand and firmly removed those lovely fingers from him.

“Sorry, treasure, but that is rather distracting.”

She yipped and wrapped her hands in his coat, clutching for dear life, “Does it tickle?”

He leaned down and with the very tip of his tongue traced over the whorls of her ear and then blew the tiniest bit of hellfire across them. She shuddered again, no longer with fear, her body pressing unconsciously ever closer to him. His mouth very close to that ear, he rumbled, “It feels like that.”

The house he had taken with Maura and her sperm donor was not far from the wretched Hotel Carling purposefully. It had made their stalking of Nora easier and the neighborhood they were in was not quite gentrified yet so the police paid little attention to the comings and goings of a group of peculiar, but wealthy, foreigners who were fixing up the place. And the drug dealers learned the hard way that there are some pregnant women you should never try to mug.

Even Loki shuddered delicately at the memory of the one whose tongue Maura had turned inside out.

Setting down carefully, he was about to set Nora down as well when he remembered she was barefoot. “Pardon,” he said, flipping his hand so she was wearing a pair of the most comfortable shoes in the world along with heavy socks made of knit silk and cashmere and  _ then _ put her down.

“Oh, that must be convenient. You must never have to pay for anything.”

“No, I do not. I have, however, made my lovers and playmates lavish me with costly and rare presents and offerings.”

“Why?” She looked at him, all innocence and confusion and as scrumptious as sachertorte frosting dotting the nipples of Phyrne’s perfect tits. 

He lifted her chin, “Driving them mad with ridiculous demands and frivolous expectations made them taste even better when I ‘let’ them have me and I ate them up, yum.”

“So does  _ Nora _ ,” she said the name as if it were snagging within her throat, “give you -”

“No. Nora gives me herself alone, and I prostrate myself before her as an offering in hopes of being found worthy.”

“That sounds  _ very  _ dramatic.”

Unable to stop himself, he wrapped his arms around her, laughing, “It is. She hates it, but she cannot make me stop.” Then the laugh caught on whatever was snarled within his lungs and he added, “I offer her all of myself, yet rarely let her speak in turn.”

Her voice was muffled against his chest, “Do you like me at all, or is it only because I’m her?”

He let her go, “You are lovely, and so very sweet, but innocence is heavenly poison to me and my kind. Seducing a naif is poor sport and the hangover from it can be hell.”

“Oh,” she looked at her new shoes. “So if I ask you to have sex before I become her again you’d say no.” Before he could shake off whatever it was those words were making him feel she plunged onward. “See, I’ve never had sex. With another person. Like I said before in the club- no, let's not talk about that. Anyway, I know that I’m really this other person, but I have been this person for a while now, not long, but a while, and it's hard to be this person. People act like I’m broken, and that my brokenness is catching and I’m very tired all of the time because I am learning  _ everything _ as it happens. Babies get years to learn the world and they do it slowly and I’m learning it all at once. But I have been this person, and when I’m Nora again I won’t be.” She trailed off and walked a few steps down the street, not really looking at anything but the open road and the sky.

The open road of broken blacktop bracketed by old houses draped in cheap Halloween decorations, and a sky blocked by nearly leafless tree branches, streetlights, and wires.

He followed, quiet and fighting to stay so.

“I won’t be…. Will I remember-”

“You will remember who you have been these months. I have no reason to think you will not.”

“That’s nice. I think. I guess. But I won’t be. So if you like me at all - and you don’t think it would be being unfaithful - will you have sex with me so if she does remember me I will have done something worth remembering, and if she doesn’t remember me I will have done something worth not forgetting? Does that EVEN make sense? Why can’t I talk like a nor-”

She started to yell, the frustration he had seen in her before when words would spill out that she couldn’t stop. He grabbed her arm and turned her hard and fast back into his arms, “Yes.”

He kissed her on that dirty street.

The house he took her to was just like all of the other ones on the street, narrow and tired looking on the outside. 

Inside, it was … different. 

It looked like something from Masterpiece Theater, with polished wood smelling of lemons and the floor covered in expensive rugs. The walls were lined with bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes and the furniture looked old but in a way that was good rather than depressing.

The beautiful, pregnant lady from when she had met Loki at the diner was sitting near the fire, her ankles crossed, staring at the fire. When they came in she jumped up, which was kind of frightening because she was massive. “Oh!”

She bustled across the room, “Did you-” she started to speak to Loki, who put up a languid hand. Her voice was like music, rather than poetry. 

“I have explained matters, which she has taken in with rather greater aplomb than we might have dreamt of. That said, there are certain things she and I must attend to before we can-”

The pregnant woman’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and may have even glowed, “Really? And I can guess whose idea would that be, then? Getting hungry, incubus?”

Loki put his fists on his hips and scowled, “Not you too, witchy woman. I get enough of that business from your baby daddy.”

“It was my idea, actually,” she said, standing on her toes between the two of them.

God, those shoes were so comfortable….

“I wanted to, that is to say, I wanted him to…”

The woman smiled at her very nicely and rolled her eyes, “As if there were any question as to who you were. Of course, it was your idea, you slut,” she said as if it was a compliment. “I’m Maura. Your cousin.” Then she looked at Loki, “You’re lucky that Baba Yaga has Thomas out scouring the city for a proper mocha. She’s a fussy old bitch, she is. And twice lucky these two are holding out for Halloween,” she added, resting a hand on her enormous stomach. Then she kissed them both on the cheek. 

It felt strange to have someone she didn’t know kiss her, but it also felt warm. 

“Yes, yes … very lucky. Just keep him from storming into the room or I promise the sight will make him aware of his shortcomings for ages. Nothing more wilting for a wizard to find he doesn’t have the biggest wand in the house.”

“We’ve all seen your wand, Loki,” Maura said. “It’s very nice.”

“Excuse me, it’s the nicest. Come along, precious, let us go to my bedchamber before the hag and the greatest living birthday party magician return.”

“It was nice to meet you,” she said over her shoulder to Maura as Loki hustled her from the room. Then she wondered if she should have used the word ‘nice’, considering.

If the room downstairs was luxurious and elegant Loki’s bedroom - bed _ chamber _ , she thought idly - was-

Was-

Spare and nearly empty.

The floor was plain wood, the window hung with mini-blinds and the only chair, the kind with rollers that they had in the office she cleaned, sat before it. One disorderly touch was what looked like a pile of clothing in one corner, mostly black.

The only concession to the nature of room’s inhabitant was the sable fur draped over the very large bed in the middle of the room. Even then, there was something about it that seemed untouched, unused. 

She frowned and walked to the bed, touching the fur. “You don’t sleep here, do you?”

“I sleep very little, precious.”

The pile of clothing caught her eye. It wasn’t really a pile, it was more of an oval, made of dresses and blouses and panties and bras and other items clearly belonging to a woman.

It was a nest, made from his lost lover’s things.

“You sleep here…” she whispered.

He turned her, running his hand slowly up the side of her neck to cup her chin, then rubbed his thumb over her lips, raising a finger to his own, “Shhhh….” Her lips opened and he teased the inside of them. Without meaning to she began to lap at his touch. He tasted wonderful, she licked and sucked and felt herself grow softer and wetter between her legs, swollen and empty. She wanted to close her eyes but it was impossible to look away from his face as he stared at her and blocked out the world.

Fire danced in the wide black of his eyes as he took one of her hands and pressed it to the front of his pants where his cock throbbed beneath the leather. Just as the heat of him had soaked through the wood of her closet door, this too was hot, almost scalding. 

But more importantly, “You…. You’re really … its big … it can’t possibly….” she backed away from his touch until she was against the wall.

The smile he gave her, with a touch of fang, was not kind. A bit of hair fell before one of his horns into his eyes, and he moved slowly, each step a prowl, until he was leaning on the wall around her. “Yes, it will. It will not hurt, and it will slide in so sweetly, so perfectly,” he teased the hem of the hoodie that was all she was wearing. With one finger he touched the bottom stop of the zipper and then traced up the elements to the slider.

She had cleaned the office at zipper factory for a month. They were a lot more complicated than they looked.

“You will love every pretty inch of my cock, and your lovely cunt will be so happy and full. But first,” he grasped the slider and undid her. She was completely open to him and if anything she was hotter, being so close to his own bare chest was like sitting by a fire. 

His voice was a growl and though beautiful, though poetry, not human, “First, I’m so hungry,” he said, going to his knees, but if anything being more intimidating than when he towered over her. 

Each of her breasts were suckled and bitten. Who knew teeth, pointy, scary teeth, could feel so good. The sharp touch of them made her hips jerk forward and he laughed around her nipple, the feel of it trembling through her skin, making her want to climb out of her flesh because then they would be even closer. He placed a hard forearm across her hips and pushed her back to the wall. 

“In  _ my  _ good time,” he murmured, moving to her other breast.

By the time he had finished she was certain several years had passed and she was whining, “Please,” over and over.

He t’sked at her, “Poor lost thing, poor innocent darling. Do you even know what you are begging for?”

She lifted her head from the wall, which was very difficult and looked at him, “Yes, I read a lot of erotic romances and touch myself.”

For a moment the seducer’s sneer changed to a look of the purest love, tender and lonely. He wrapped his arms about her and pressed a kiss between her breasts, “Oh,” he said, just once. 

Then he stood, lifting her and then her back was on that wonderful fur on his bed, “I don’t think fur is -”

He knelt, spreading her legs, and gave her a long lick from the back to the very tip of her clit, making her suck in so much air she nearly choked, “Demonic bear, killed it with my own horns,” he said before burying his face between her thighs, thrusting what had to be an unnaturally long tongue into her.

Her body was a flood.

She was drowning in her own body, forgetting how to think or breathe, only feeling what he was doing to her. He licked his way in and out of her. She wanted to plant her feet and raise herself to him but her need was like a weight on her, pressing her arms, and legs, and chest. 

It was good. It was good. It was getting better. It was getting amazing. It was going to be-

Then he stopped and she was able to lift her head a bit. He had leaned his cheek upon his hand and was looking at her smiling. “Shall I show you something?”

“ _ Now? _ ”

Without looking away he touched his fingertip to her clit and circled, “Keep looking … now, this is what it feels like when you are about to come your brains out from clitoral stimulation.” That circling worked into her, the pleasure spiraling. She wanted to drop her head back but couldn’t look away from that pleased, smug smile. 

It was good. It was good. It was getting better. It was getting amazing. It was going to be-

He stopped again.

She bit off a frustrated scream.

“Now this,” he said in that same pleasant tone, while thrusting into her with that one finger, “is what happens when I pet your g-spot….”

Oh, god, now she did fall back, she couldn’t help herself. Her hips worked against that lovely intrusion.

It was good. It was good. It was getting better. It was getting amazing. It was going to be-

That time she didn’t bother to bite back the scream.

“Now the u-spot must be treated with great gentleness….”

“That is it!” Thomas threw down the book he had been trying to read, tossed back the blankets and prepared to storm to Loki’s … lair and demand that they stop fucking and do the damned ceremony to get Nora’s memory back.

“Thomas,” Maura put a hand on his arm, “darling I know that you are tense, but if I can wait, and _ they _ can wait,” she pointed to her enormous midsection, “then you can wait. I promise I won’t even start going into labor until noon.”

He sat back down next to his wife and sighed, “I still don’t understand how you can know such things for certain.”

She started reading again, “I would think a five-hundred-year-old wizard would have had enough experience with witches to know that baby-business is our bread and butter. Even Baba Yaga has midwife’d a few times I would guess. Though I’d not have her babysit. I’ve heard stories about what she eats.”

“Well, I’ve only spent a great deal of time with witches late-” he stopped himself and then looked where Maura was calmly turning the page, his skin prickling with adrenaline while his heart had what could only be described as a conniption fit. Or perhaps a ST segment elevation myocardial infarction.

She put down her book and frowned at him, “Don’t look at me like that. You know that I am an expert at research and a hacker of no little infamy, do you really think I wouldn’t have done my due diligence on you before the first time I let you bend me over your knee and give me a dozen good ones? Because, Thomas of Harwich, who was known as the Wizard Baron and was thought to have died in 1537, believe me I did.”

“You mean you allowed me to think all of this time that I was deceiving you? Keeping from you that you were married to-”

“An old fella? Yea, I did,” she grinned, her Irish accent broad and smug.

He leaned in close, his face inches from hers, staring until she fidgeted and dropped her eyes, “Oh, little girl, you have accrued a debt that your behind is going to pay with interest.”

She lifted a brow and gave him a soft peck without looking up, “I should hope so, sir.”

By the time Loki finally crawled up her body she could no longer move. Or even whimper. She was swollen and miserable and every muscle in her body hurt from being tense and ready and then nothing and she wanted to punch his beautiful nose.

He gathered her against him, and when his cock slid into her, too thick and too long, she was so amazed it ached but did not hurt, it invaded but did not harm. 

It was so good, she felt tears roll down her face.

He licked every one of them away.

“You are going to come for me now, precious,” he crooned, pressing her closer, stealing a little of her breath.

“I … I don’t … it was too long … I can’t … It ran away … you chased it away with too much teasing.”

He laughed against her cheek, “No, sweetheart, no, its going to be so good. You can feel it happening now, can’t you? Its starting so deep in you. Deeper than you knew you even went. There, I can feel your cunt beating around me like an eager heart, pulling me in, wanting more of this. Wanting to come and come for me.” He whispered deep in her ear, “I know what you need.”

His voice was the darkest thing in hell.

He reached between them and pressed down hard where his cock was within her, striking every spot he had just shown her in such excruciating detail.

She exploded, the pleasure pouring out of her like honey from a comb, like music from a violin, slick and wild. 

HIs arms now rigid at either side of her head, Loki started thrusting hard, “Ride it out, grind me, do it again!” 

By the time she had finished, that he let her finish, she was sure her bones were powder, her body little more than meat, her brain gone forever. She was barely aware when he wrapped them in the fur, his still hard cock wet and throbbing against her back.

From somewhere, she heard music before she slept.

  
  


Loki was heavily asleep, so she crept out of the room. 

The soft, strange sound which she had first thought was music and that had woken her was coming from downstairs and though she should have been afraid, surrounded by powerful creatures and mysteries, it was too compelling. 

A bit of false dawn’s light peeked through a pair of heavy velvet curtains, washing all of the color out of the beautiful living room she had seen the night before, leaving it dully grey and bleak, save for one light, pink and golden and soft, coming from something on what looked for all of the world like an altar against one of the walls.

She stood over it. It  _ was _ an altar, bedecked with leaves and candles, incense burners and twists of herbs held together by silken threads, books and bells, and all manner of pagan things that she didn’t have names for.

In the center of it all, on a silver dish, nestled in a piece of cloth, was a crystal also wrapped up, apparently to hold it together because long cracks ran through it and part of it looked like it was flaking away. 

The sound came from it. 

She knelt beside the altar and picked the crystal up, holding it to her ear but the sound was still muffled, so she carefully unrolled it from the piece of silk that it was wrapped in. This time when she held it to her ear the noise was a piercing shriek, like a woman being stabbed, and the pain of it made her hand convulse closed, turning the crystal into powder that coated her fingers and fell to the ground like ash.

Loki woke with a start of terror. 

Nora was gone. 

He ran through the house, down the stairs, praying that he would find her in the kitchen. She was a devotee of post-coital snacking. 

Rather, he found her before Maura’s little altar. Before he could ask what she was doing, kneeling naked, her head down, her shoulders slumped, he saw with a crawling, destroying horror the remnants of Nora’s memory in broken bits on the carpet.

“What have you done?” His voice was a rasp, barely more than air moving. He could not move, could not think. Then his knees gave out and he was little more than a husk on the floor, his wings hanging like they were broken. 

He was broken.

Then she turned her head to look at him over her shoulder, “Don’t get your plumage ruffled, Feathers,” she said with a teasing grin.

“Nora?” he begged, looking at her, at the way she crossed her arms not to cover her breasts but because she was impatient with him, at the amusement and love in her bright eyes, at that wicked, wicked mouth. 

She nodded, "In the flesh," then she looked down at herself, "and the altogether, as usual."

He lunged, wrapping her in his arms and legs and wings and tail and hair and anything else that could, ready to bite to death anyone who dared come near. “My treasure, my witch, my love,” he murmured, or wanted to, for once, for him, no words would form. Rather, he stroked her hair, touching her everywhere, greedy and possessive and utterly without a thought other than, ‘staystaystay.’

All of her skin was against all of his skin as it had been before, but now with her  _ there  _ as well, with her thoughts and her life and her spirit and all of the rest that was Nora, Loki lost his own mind in turn. 

Out of control, he even found himself rutting his agonized cock against her, possibly leaving bruises, as well as streaks of precum. 

She laughed. Her terrible, snorting laugh, “Ok, I know this has been very hard on you, this two whole weeks, but I was the one stuck like this for eight months.”

“Mine…” he hissed, having forgotten most words.

She kissed his cheek, his chin, his forehead, “Feathers, Feathers you have to let me go. Because we have to go.”

At the words ‘let me go’ he wrapped himself harder, almost cutting off her breath, not quite taking in the part about them going together.

“I need to get to Aunt Claire’s house.” She stroked his chest comfortingly, “Don’t you want to see what I looked like when I was four years old and dressed up for Halloween?”

In a trice smoke like a snake spun about them and was gone, leaving the two of them standing just a few inches apart, Nora in a little black dress with wool stockings and combat boots, Loki in black trousers with a green shirt and boots to match hers, his horns safely out of sight. His only concession to glamour the thick, deep purple satin ribbon that held his hair in a queue. 

“Shall we?” he asked, reaching out for her hand.

She took his and smiled, “I’ll drive.”

“What?” he asked. Or would have, but the teleportation cut him off mid-”wha.”

  
  
  


  
  



	9. This is Halloween

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Halloween, things happen

It was so early that when they appeared on the street a block from what was in this time Claire’s house it was quiet enough for Loki to hear the air displace about them and then blow back inwards, sending Nora’s hair into a wild swirl about her head. 

She laughed happily, pushing the short locks behind her ear as she grabbed Loki’s hand and started walking down the middle of the road, pulling him behind. “Wait, aren’t you about to offer up your accounts?” he asked, looking at her concerned.

Head tilted, she raised a brow at him, “Offer up my accounts? This is 1993, not 1893. I know being ancient it must get confusing,” she said, patting his arm comfortingly. “Or maybe Thomas is starting to rub off on you?”

The frightened, lost creature he had taken to bed, so pale and sickly looking, had been banished by a Nora who was nearly giddy. Loki, still out of sorts and internally shuddering from the nightmare of what he had feared when discovering she had destroyed the memory crystal, crossed his arms and gave her a stern look, “Fine, then. Are you gonna hurl?” he asked in the broadest of Sout’ Side accents. Then, in his own voice, added, “And even back before I became part of the most unlikely committed relationship in creation I would not have let Thomas rub  _ anything _ off on me…. Probably.”

She snorted at him, and he was a little abashed at how it made him tingle. He was who knew how many thousands of years old and he was tingling. 

“I have never felt better. When I got my memories back in a rush I saw Claire and my mother talking about teleportation. Apparently, my grandmother could do it, and they said something that clicked. Now come on!”

He let himself be pulled, wondering how long this manic energy would last.

A slow, rusty Oldsmobile rolled down the street so someone could lean out of the backseat and lazily toss newspapers onto the frost-covered lawns. The block was mostly the same, save that there was an old laundromat on the corner where there was now a perpetually empty high rise condo owned by a notoriously unscrupulous developer. Nora, and Claire before her, regularly hexed it so they found it nearly impossible to sell any of the units and so those who moved in were so uncomfortable they tended to move right out again. 

Nora sighed as the passed the laundromat, “The Perez’s were such good people.” She looked at the sky which was brightening even as the wind kicked up. It was freezing and he watched her breaths pipe into the air. “C’mon,” she wrapped her arms about his and huddled her shoulders towards him whilst hustling him down the street. 

“Why are we in such a hurry?”

“Because, for the moment anyway, I remember everything. Everything. And I know what is about to happen.”

Fallen, fire coloured leaves from sugar maples, and yellow wisps fallen from the few elms that remained, were trimmed with frost and crunched under their boots. 

Loki manifested a warmer, longer coat over Nora, though she did not seem to notice. She stopped a few doors down from the house that in the future was their home, which looked little fresher in 1993 than it did in 2019. A long line of badly carved Jack o’lanterns flickered on the railing of the porch, and a full murder of crows lined the eaves. At first, he thought them to be decor until one raised its wings and cawed. “Aunt Claire paid them in rhinestone jewelry and lizard eyes to do that every Halloween when I was a kid…” Nora told him dreamily. “I guess she knew I was into things with wings, even then.”

Before he could retort the front door of the bungalow burst open and a tiny figure dressed in black raced out, running down the icy sidewalk with the sure-footed carelessness of childhood. In one hand she clutched a small version of a classic witch’s broom, save that the bristles were covered in green glitter, in the other a very plebeian plastic pumpkin for collecting largess.

Her whole costume was clearly custom and lovingly made, proving that someone had been playing dress-up with Nora at some point far more successfully than Loki had ever been able to. The dress was made of layers of black and purple tulle, with full skirts covered in glittering bats and ruby spiders, the latter of which moved, spinning gilded webs that then dissipated only to be spun again. The sleeves were puffed and her cape was velvet, lined with satin, and trimmed in fur. The band of her pointed hat was a gleaming silver tiara. 

A witch princess, perfectly crafted by loving hands. Or magic.

Loki could not have been more enchanted if she had waved the scepter/wand that was tucked into her belt and turned him into a newt.

But when she slammed out of the gate to run down the street he noticed her eyes were red and her face streaked with dried tears.

“What has happened? Where is your adorable self running?” he asked Nora.

She shook her head, “Nowhere. Anywhere. It’s Halloween and Claire hadn’t planned to tell me about my parents until afterward. She didn’t want it ruined for me but I found out anyway. I heard her the night before talking to the Inuit woman who brought her… Look.”

Because the witch princess turned to look behind her, checking for pursuit, she barrelled straight into Loki’s legs, having not noticed that there was anything as boring or dull as adults in the street. Before he could stop himself he had grabbed her, lifting her high in the air, “Take care, Your Highness.”

For a second the little girl stopped crying and just stared at him, her brown eyes wide and wider. 

Oh, how adorable she was! He turned to look at his Nora, to tell her as much, just in time to see her teleport away.

He was unable to react for her little self - to prove utterly who she already was - reached out and snatched the wide, purple satin ribbon that held his hair back and brandished it before his face, “Put me down or I’ll curse you.”

It was all he could do not to hug her. Instead, he turned and placed her very carefully on the ground behind him, “On your way then, sire.”

She looked at him, frowning. “I’m keeping this,” she said, putting the ribbon in her pumpkin, taking off again. 

Loki placed a hand to his heart and bowed, “Honored.”

At that moment Claire also burst out of the house, clattering down the stairs in a pair of high-heeled, feathered mules, frowning at Loki she ran after her niece. Narrowing her eyes, but not stopping, she grumbled, “I know something’s wrong about you but I don’t have time for this shit.”

Neither did he.

They ran in opposite directions, shouting for different ages of the same witch.

Loki had taken a few steps, when his Nora walked out of the bungalow, grinning like one of the ineptly carved pumpkins on the porch. “She got your ribbon?” She walked down the stairs slowly, smiling at him, “Man, I had that thing in my ballerina jewelry box for years. Never could remember where I got it from.” She stopped on the last step and waited for him to get close, and then put her hands on his shoulders, “Don’t feel bad. I am about to have a very busy day. I manage to stay ahead of Claire until four o’clock. She was very unhappy, but with what happened to my parents there wasn’t much she could do about it.”

He took so many deep breaths to calm himself, “Don’t ever-”

Then he saw she was crying, too.

“Oh, my precious witch. You remember everything today. You have lost them again for the first time, have you not? And Claire as well?”

She nodded, and he gently wrapped his arms about her and let her cry into his now wild and unbound hair, whilst he stroked her back and gently rocked back and forth. What pleasure to be able to offer comfort now, even if he had not been there to offer it when the wounds were first created. Loki felt his knees grow weak at the joy of it and at the pain she felt.

When finally her tears began to taper off, he gently ran his hand down her hair, whispering, “Ah, but you are able to remember meeting me for the first time as well. What a delight I was to you in those early days.”

Then she laughed.

By the time Nora had her shit together enough to teleport them back to the house that Loki had been sharing with Maura and Thomas, Baba Yaga had returned and there was a lot of noise and panic.

“Shit, I think Maura might be in labor,” she said, tossing her coat to Loki and running up the stairs two at a time, Cat Claire bounding at her side, offering a running commentary.

“Yeah, the wizard has lost his shit, BY is being a total bitch, and Maura, well, she’s trying to push two magical babies out of her and they are apparently fighting over who goes first, so glad to have you back. They weren’t supposed to come until closer to midnight, but no one told themeow. MEOW!  _ MEOWHISSSHHHHGRROUWHHHHLLLL!” _

Nora looked down at her furry aunt. “Great. Now the spell wears off?”

The cat continued to make frustrated noises but finally gave up and lay on the stairs, flicking her tail and ear in annoyance.

“Ok. It’s all me then,” Nora said, mentally girding her loins and really wishing that not all of this was happening on the same day. But Halloween was always fucked up for her. She could remember that now, starting with the one when she found out her parents weren’t coming home.

When she was seven Aunt Claire and her best friend Joe were arrested for starting a fight at the Navy Pier Freaky Frights and Pumpkin Lights event with a group of Christian protesters. Aunt Claire broke a woman’s nose, and Joe, who was transmogrified ifrit, caused all of their posters to burst into stunning, black and orange flames that everyone thought was part of the show. Nora spent the rest of the night, her dog costume lightly singed and wet, kicking her heels on a chair at the old 7th district police station, eating candy from the bowl on the receiving desk and watching costumed drunks being processed.

There had been the year she got food poisoning from bobbing for apples in questionable water, the year she’d gotten her first period while dressed like Frosty the Snowman, the year she caught her best friend in bed with Claire, the year of the fire, the year of the car accident, the year that someone stole the moon and EVERY witch had a bad Samhain, the year of the centralized blizzard in the front yard where they were snowed into the house for a week because of a frenemy of her mother’s deciding to play a prank on Nora for old time’s sake, the year when all of the dogs followed her for some reason, the year she discovered slivovitz - that had been all her own fault.

And then, last year, Loki and the wings that didn’t work incident.

It seemed vastly unfair and a little bit too much of a coincidence that nearly every Halloween of her life had been fucking dire. 

Nora was determined she was going to turn it around. First, she was going to help Maura with those babies, and then she was going to have a little talk with Baba Yaga. 

And then she had some unfinished business with Loki. 

But first, her screaming cousin.

Maura knew she most likely was not dying, yet she found that to be less than comforting as she screamed bloody murder, or tried to, for the nine thousandth time. 

Her throat ached. So, probably, did Thomas’s, for she had it in a death grip.

Dagda help him if he told her to breathe  _ one more time _ .

He was giving her a look of both sympathy and distress, patting at her arm as if both wanting to comfort her and perhaps get her to let go. 

Maura snarled, but before she could tell him exactly where he could shove that comfort and how far up a contraction racked through her body like a storm ripping the surface off of the ocean and throwing it across the land, leaving nothing in its path. She let go of Thomas, thrusting her hips up and using her fists to give her leverage on the bed. Anything to get his hellspawn out of her body.

Then, when the pain subsided for a few moments and the endorphins kicked in, she sent what she hoped were soothing thoughts to the babies. “Mama loves you, daddy loves you, it’s actually quite nice out here. Lots of blankets, and, er, other baby things. Things babies like. I cannot wait to meet you, and your daddy is the most lovely wonderful man, who is going to make you flying ponies and will never ever spank you, just Mama, which I probably shouldn’t mention to you. Please come out!”

They were having none of it.

That they were witch/wizard babies didn’t help matters. There was a lot of mystical energy being expelled by them in their panic to not be evicted from their comfy home. Thomas had often mentioned he thought Maura had a magical pussy, yet she was fairly certain this was not what he had meant.

“Right, a woman can’t lose her memory and unwittingly time travel twenty-six years into the past without all hell breaking loose, can she?” Nora’s voice said from somewhere in the direction of where Maura vaguely remembered there being a door to the torture chamber she was trapped in.

Then…

“Nora!?”

Her cousin, her bright brown eyes dancing and apparently not worried at all, leaned over Maura smiling. “Every bit of me. Plus, I now know five effective ways to get coffee and toner stains out of upholstery, AND I can currently remember every single thing Claire and your mum ever so much as  _ mentioned  _ about midwifery in my presence, so it’s me kind of improved. Now let’s see if we can’t get those babies out of you as easily as those stains and create some really good Halloween memories for a change.”

Thomas sagged back into a chair, “Thank god,” he rasped from his aching, bruised throat.

Maura nodded, then dug her nails into Nora’s wrists, screaming, “All of them!”

Loki paced through the downstairs of the house like he was the expectant father. 

In truth, though he found Maura utterly adorable, and had even come to be … fondish of Thomas, he simply wanted Nora to be done so they could -

He heard a cry from Maura that curdled his ichor and thought perhaps he was a tad worried about Nora’s fair cousin and the babes in waiting.

“Don’t worry, little witch and little witch’s cousin are doing fine,” Baba Yaga said from where she sat on the couch, drinking an astonishingly large mocha whilst flipping through Aperture magazine, clicking her tongue with distress at the pictures. “Fucking black and white. Sooooo intellectual. Pretentious fucks.”

“When the hell did you get here? Get up those stairs right now and help with that … business,” Loki demanded, pointing as if somehow the ancient witch wouldn’t understand the concept of getting up the stairs.

“Nope. I said it in 1945 when I helped Helen Mirren be born for the thirty-seventh time and I meant it, no more midwifing for me. I swear if I get placenta on me one more time I’m gonna lose my mind and trust me, no one wants that. Don’t worry, little witch and little witch are just fine, as long as Wizzo the Wizard stays out of the way.”

There was another, louder, scream, and then an uncanny silence. 

Then the cry of a baby, and then another, near but not quite identical cry.

“Noisy, but fine,” Baba Yaga added, sipping her coffee. 

The clean-up was almost as brutal as the birth, at least for Nora. It was never wise to use magic around newborns with powers, as they tended to lock onto things early and sometimes unwittingly imitate what they thought was happening with very chaotic results.

It was a family legend that when she was born her mother’s friend Kat used a little magic to open the window to let some air into the room and Nora, in her unformed baby brain, thought that felt nice so she made a hole in the wall. 

So while Thomas, with the tenderness of a man who had waited for centuries to be a father, cleaned and swaddled the babies under Maura’s exhausted direction, Nora cleaned up Maura and the bed the hard way.

“Do you have names in mind?” she whispered, as Thomas settled a baby on either side of their very eager and barely conscious mother.

Thomas gave her a weary smile, “Over the years I have come up with thousands. But Eusubias and Grisell just don’t have the same ring that once they did.”

“Was thinking Claire, for her,” Maura whispered over the tiny head of her daughter.

Nora felt her heart pound, “As long as you don’t call her poor brother Clarence.”

Thomas put an arm around her shoulder, “Never. Thank you.” He kissed her cheek. 

“No. Thank you. For coming with him.”

“We would never have let that harum-scarum creature come to fetch you alone, cousin,” he said, gently easing her towards the door so he could be alone with his wife and children.

That was fine with Nora. She had felt Baba Yaga returning. She and that old hag had unfinished business.

Loki had expected a number of things when Nora finally descended but even his rather vivid imagination had not considered her teleporting into the living room, grabbing Baba Yaga by her housecoat front, and growling into her face, “Tell me the truth!”

The ancient witch shook her head, “Bad form, baby, bad form. You’re pissed, I get it, Baba gets it, but you Don’t Touch The Supreme!”

Nora flew back across the room, slamming into a thankfully empty wall, her heels leaving deep gouges in the wooden floor, cracks appeared in the plaster, and dust greyed her hair. She righted herself and gathered power in her hands, a glowing black with flickers of fiery orange deep within. “This was the test, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a mistake, you meant to take my memories.”

Loki’s wings snapped out, his horns burned, his fangs and talons grew, and he rounded on Baba Yaga, words refusing to form, only sounds. Sounds that proved how far from human he was. 

The hag snorted, “Clearly. You get a point for figuring that obvious bullshit out, witchlet. The other two weren’t even that ‘smart’.” She actually made air quotes and then slammed her hands together, making the old wood of the building start to creak and groan as it moved towards Nora.

Loki grabbed her about the waist and flew as high as the ceiling would allow, while Nora leaned over his arm and lobbed a ball of flame at the arms of wood, making it shrink back in fear.

Upstairs, the babies started to cry.

“But the time travel, the teleporting, you weren’t expecting that. You fucked up, BY, and you hate that. You’re getting old,” Nora yelled, raising her now empty hands to pull the wood away from the power of the other witch and turn it back towards her.

“You’re pretty good right now, all hyped up on memories and realizations, but not good enough to take me.” Baba Yaga stomped the ground and the copper wiring in the walls snaked out and grabbed Nora from him before he could react, dragging her to stand before their mistress. “Yes, I fucked up, and no one likes it. I fucked up not realizing those cunts were planning a coup, by not realizing you were going to be a pain in the ass and lose your whole fucking memory, not just part of it. But alls well that ends well, they lived happily ever after, all of that mortal crap.”

Before he could spring at the Queen of the Witches, Nora had recovered, twitching the fingers on her one free hand so she teleported out of the wires and back into his arms, placing a hand on his back, just where the wings sprouted, painfully, wonderfully, from his flesh. “Shhh…. It’s ok. I have this. I need to have this.”

As ever, her touch magnetized him. He turned and looked at her, feeling the fire from his own eyes. “If she harms you I will rend her to parts and feed her flesh to the wildest hounds of hell.”

Nora took his face in her hands, “I love you, too,” she spoke slowly, as if she had all of the time in the world. “When we went to Claire’s I wanted to get-”

“We’re having a fight here, you morons!” Baba Yaga yelled, winding up like she was getting ready to throw a ball of something.

They never did find out what, although there was a foul smell of dank water and dead bodies that grew in the air. Before she could unleash, Nora bopped out of Loki’s arms, reappearing behind the hag, tossing a very ugly yellow and pink afghan over her head and wrapping her arms around the struggling, vilely cursing, woman.

Even Loki was a bit shocked at some of the things that came out from under that blanket. Most of them were in a very old language from the Taiga that had not been spoken in over a thousand years or Nora’s ears would have melted off.

“Now listen, you rotten old who-knows-what you are. You owe me an apology that I know I am never going to get. So instead you are going to put me on the council, you are going to not make a fuss about me and him because he is non-negotiable, AND you are going to give me that spell to extend my life  _ now _ . If I am going to have the hottest lover in the world for centuries to come I don’t want to worry about breaking a hip when I ride him.”

They could both actually hear Baba Yaga rolling her eyes, “Ok, I get it. You are so in love with each other. Every timeline, every iteration, blah blah blah. So boring! Why can’t you be enemies now and then, that might be exciting? No?” Loki had no idea what she was talking about and from the look on Nora’s face neither did she. The hag sighed and threw up her hands, the fingers popping out of the yarn, “Fine. You get to be on the council. You can keep the angel. He can probably take care of himself.”

Loki gently set down, finding himself much calmer even though the tips of his horns were still molten, “I can assure you tha-”

Baba Yaga ignored him, pulling the blanket off with Nora’s help, making a t’sk of annoyance that her babushka was crooked. “The original idea was to spare people the pain of losing their lover and children to time, to enemies, but I suppose if he can survive falling from heaven-”

“I was pushed, actually.”

“And breaking up with that annoying God-”

“Contrary to rumors we were just good friends.”

“And that fucker Lucifer - bitch still owes me money - then I suppose he won’t get in your way too much.” 

At that moment Thomas thundered down the stairs, his eyes blazing as much as Loki’s ever had, a spell already going, “If you don’t all shut up so Maura can sleep no one is going to be anything because I am going to banish you all to the Dimension of Eternal Itching. Go make yourselves useful figuring out the least stressful way to get us back to the present time. But quietly!”

He somehow managed to give the impressing of shouting without raising his voice much above a tense whisper, and then nodded and returned back upstairs.

“The Dimension of Eternal Itching? Is that a real thing?” Nora asked.

Loki and BY shrugged. It could be. There were a lot of dimensions.

They made it back to the present by 11 pm Chicago time, and even though Baba Yaga tried to persuade them to return to Morocco everyone else wanted to sleep in their own beds.

Nora kissed Maura and the babies, and gave Thomas a hug that he de-Brit’d himself long enough to accept. Loki pecked Maura’s cheek, touched each baby lightly on the nose - which they both seemed to like as much as anything that young was capable of expressing an opinion beyond hunger and tiredness - and then he and Thomas eyed each other.

Finally, the wizard extended a hand and they shook warily, “You never did find that thing we were looking for.”

Loki shrugged, “I’ll wing it.” And before Thomas could fully absorb the enormity of what he had said, he turned to Nora, “Home, James.”

It would never replace flying, but teleportation had its advantages.

They arrived back in Chicago just minutes before the clock struck midnight, landing on the porch and giving a scare to a drunken party-goer who had stumbled out of the corner bar dressed as Satan and had stepped into their supposedly empty front yard to pee.

When Claire yowled at him in disgust and he saw them all standing there, he took off running, urine splattering his shoes.

“He looks nothing like you,” Loki called at his quickly retreating back.

Nora patted her fallen angel on the chest, “I have to do something, light the pumpkins, will you?” She said, pointing to the line of ineptly carved Jack O’Lanterns on her porch. They had carved them before she had left for Morocco, putting a simple preservation spell on them. “And then pour us each a drink and meet me in the living room,” she added, before spinning around and running into the house. 

From the corner of her eyes, she saw Loki point at each of the gourds in turn, firing candles as he went.

She wanted to watch him, but she needed to do this by midnight so she took the stairs two at a time, heading to her old bedroom.

“Ah, this is one of those terrible family traditions. I understand now,” he muttered just loud enough for her to hear.

In her childhood bedroom, which later became a storage space when she moved to the attic as an adult, there was a narrow closet with shelves that was supposed to be used for shoes, but had been filled with spell components and hats instead. Behind the top shelf there was a loose board and over the years Nora had hidden all manner of contraband in it - cigarettes, pot, a flask of slivovitz, even nudes from her first serious boyfriend who had been an artist and drawn himself for her. 

She had placed her first warding spell on it so no one was never able to find anything that was hidden in it. Not Claire. Not even herself.

Which was why in the farthest back corner of it, there was a bundle of cloth, no bigger than a palmful, that Nora had placed there either twenty-six years ago or just that morning, depending on how one counted time. 

She opened the bit of dusty velvet and smiled. She and Claire had spent years trying to find what she had hidden, and today she had remembered the last time either of them had seen it, when it had been amongst her parent’s few effects which had been sent back to them from the Arctic. On the Halloween she had found out they had died.

So, knowing she wanted it, and that Claire would be out of the house that morning chasing her, Nora had gone to the house and hidden it from them.

Which opened one up to a lot of weird questions about how time worked, but at the moment Nora didn’t care.

Taking off her coat, she looked at herself in the mirror, shaking her head. “This is crazy.”

The mantle clock - which only had a mantle to sit on since Loki’s angelic half had redesigned her living room - showed her it was nearly midnight. 

Loki was pouring them both a whisky at the drinks cart that had been his contribution to the decor. “I am assuming you will forgo the rocks?” he asked, turning.

Not answering, Nora ran the few steps across the room, dropped to one knee with one eye on the second hand, and held up her father’s wedding ring, “Happy anniversary. Will you marry me?”

The clock boinged.

Loki froze, standing over her, holding the two drinks, staring down at her hand with an expression that even for an ageless demonic angel was positively inhuman and saying nothing.

“Will I marry you?” he asked, cocking his head. “What a ridiculous question.”

Nora’s heart dropped. She knew it was presumptuous. By Loki’s timeline, they had been together for a minute. For less than a minute. And no matter how much he loved her, and she knew that he did, she was still just a -

Whatever she was about think was driven from her mind by the force of Loki’s everything as his wings exploded out, his horns burst into actual flame, his tail wrapped around her, pulling her into his arms as he plucked the ring out of her hand and slid it on, “You need not to  _ ask _ me to marry you, you need only  _ tell _ me when.”

Then he kissed her. He kissed her properly and truly for the first time since she had become herself. Until they were both gasping, both trying to climb into each other’s clothing. Nora pulled away, while staying in his arms, “You were so sweet last night, so gentle, so lovely. But you didn’t finish.”

Loki kissed her again, his mouth skimming hers as he pulled off his sweater, both of them enjoying the extra time it was taking them to undress as people would. “That is for you alone, precious witch. She was sweet and gentle and lovely and so deserved that from me, but I belong to you.”

Nora stepped back, so she could pull the dress over her head, taking her bra with it, so she was dressed only in her tights and those damned combat boots with all of those laces, “And if I hadn’t come back? If it didn’t work?”

Loki stopped, his fly open, his shirt off, beautiful, impossibly so, with a look of near grief on his face, “No,” was all he said. He pulled her back to him, and with one of his talons slit open her tights, kissing her and kissing her. She wrapped herself about his arms and legs, his upright cock trapped between them where she rubbed herself along its length, teasing them both. 

Her cunt was swollen and her arousal prickled and ached. He was soaked with both her wet and his precum when he pressed her to the wall and scooped his hips so she took him in. Loki cradled the back of Nora’s head, holding her in place so as they kissed more lushly, more wildly, he stole her breath, only allowing her air when he willed it. 

Her thighs trembled and she canted her hips upwards to let him deeper, so deeper he went, fucking slow and hard as if he would be able to go all of the way through her. Disappear all of the way into her. 

Nora grabbed the flaming brand that was one of his horns and dug her nails into the back of his neck, wanting to fall backward and just let him use her. But Loki would have none of it, he kept her close and with him for every moment. 

When the pace grew brutal he moved his teeth to her throat and transformed his cock to its demonic form, filling her too full, hurting her just right, pleasuring her to the point of dissolution, making her scream and thrash and beg and finally come and then again and then finally hard enough and long enough to satisfy him as well. Until the tight contractions of her ravenous cunt were too much for Loki to withstand, burying himself in her and holding on as he lost control, bucking up wildly into his own orgasm.

They ended up in a heap on the floor, Loki’s back to the wall, still in Nora who straddled his lap and hid her face in his neck while he stroked her back, talking tender nonsense. Now and then they would kiss, just soft busses, and say ‘I love you’ or words that meant that. 

After a few moments she felt him stir within her, and she smiled against his skin, rocking back and forth, so sensitive she felt little mini-orgasms quake through her as she moved slowly. Other than a little strain around his thin, clever mouth, Loki looked more peaceful than she had ever seen him. His eyes were poisonous green and calm and heavily lidded, his arms loose about her hips, as he let her work gently on him, giving himself over. 

Nora loved him so much it could hurt, but it didn’t.

“So,” she asked, with a little mischief in her voice, “where should we have the wedding?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween to all of you! It's snowing in Chicago, but it hope is it crisp, brightly moonlit, and full of ghosts and witches - and sexy demons - wherever you are!

**Author's Note:**

> All of my witchcraft stuff is made up and has nothing to do with any actual practices.


End file.
